CUSP for Safe Surgery (SUSP)

Option Year One Report

A Project of: / Johns Hopkins University Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality
American College of Surgeons
University of Pennsylvania
Contract No: / HHSA2902010000271
Dates: / September 2012 – August 2013
Disclaimer: / This report was developed with data collected and analyzed under contract with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

3 | CUSP for Safe Surgery Option Year One Report

Table of Contents

Executive Summary 3

Introduction and Objectives 4

Methods 4

Hospital Recruitment 4

Recruitment Plan 5

SUSP Portal and Database 5

Safety Climate Measurement (Hospital Survey on Patient Safety [HSOPS]) 5

Surgical Site Infection Rate Reporting 6

Ethnographic Methods and Process 6

Results 6

State and Hospital Recruitment 6

Safety Climate (HSOPS) Data 8

HSOPS Data Collection Method and Interim Participation Rates 8

HSOPS Interim Results 8

Surgical Site Infection Data 9

Ethnographic Data and Lessons-Learned 11

A Lesson Re-Learned: The Adaptive Work of Culture Change is Challenging 11

The NPT Needs to Enable Horizontal Learning 11

Teams Want Flexibility within a Defined Program Structure 11

The Path Forward 12

Reverse Innovation: Learning from International SUSP Sites 12

Conclusion 12

References 14

Appendix A: Sample Ethnography Site Visit Memo 15

Executive Summary

Background

Nearly 50 million people have surgery each year in the U.S. Approximately one million develop serious complications and over 150,000 patients die within 30 days. Healthcare acquired infections are among the most common complications in surgery patients. These complications impart an enormous burden on patients, their families, employers, and society. While the cost of caring for surgical patients without complications varies among hospitals, any single complication can double or triple the costs of care. In-hospital complications are also strongly associated with hospital readmission. As such, there is a clinical and economic imperative to prevent surgical harm.

A collaborative multifaceted approach is needed to reduce these complications. The Department of Health and Human Services’ National Action Plan to Reduce Healthcare-Associated Infection provides a national level plan; yet healthcare is local. Surgical safety requires a strategy to engage front-line clinicians and hospital leaders; utilize performance measures clinicians believe are valid; adapt methods based on local context to ensure patients receive evidence-based therapies; and implement a process to improve culture and teamwork and learn from mistakes. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has funded a National Project Team (NPT) with representatives from the Johns Hopkins University Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality in partnership with the American College of Surgeons, the University of Pennsylvania and the World Health Organization to design, disseminate and evaluate CUSP for Safe Surgery (SUSP), a surgical safety program that provides shape to this strategy.

Participation

All acute care hospitals across the United States and Puerto Rico are eligible to participate in SUSP. Recruitment began in the project’s base year, and is ongoing. The recruitment plan has evolved to enable broader participation in the project over time. To date, a total of 12 coordinating entities and 159 hospitals have enrolled in the SUSP project. 11 hospitals enrolled during the base year, and 148 hospitals enrolled during option year one. Recruitment for cohort four was opened in August 2013.

Conclusions

The NPT is learning how to locally tailor and disseminate SUSP in a complex healthcare environment with frontline clinicians and coordinating entities that are more overextended than ever before. Currently there is insufficient data from hospital teams to draw conclusions about the impact of SUSP on SSI rates, but the NPT anticipates that SSI data submission rates will improve over the second option year. By tapping the intrinsic motivation of frontline staff in perioperative units across the country, SUSP will yield powerful stories, meaningful data, and safer care for surgical patients.

Introduction and Objectives

Since 2009, over 1,000 hospitals have joined On the CUSP: Stop BSI to eliminate central line-associated blood stream infections (CLABSI), a hospital-associated infection once perceived as inevitable, in their intensive care units.1 Their indisputable success shows that engaged teams can transform care when they own a problem, apply proven improvement strategies, and learn from each other.2 Surgical teams at the Johns Hopkins Hospital have applied these principles in their perioperative area, and reduced their surgical site infection (SSI) rates by 33 percent.3

Yet duplication of this success at a national scale is not guaranteed. Surgical teams have exceedingly complex social and political structures enmeshed in a rich and noble history, full of traditions and hierarchy, comprised of many sub-teams. The science for surgical harm prevention is less mature than CLABSI prevention. The measures are noisy. Yet the need could not be greater: Quick fixes have not been effective, and preventable harm in surgical patients continues seemingly unabated.

The SUSP NPT has tapped the collective wisdom of quality improvement experts, diverse stakeholder groups, and clinicians to develop and implement SUSP as an innovative national project to reduce surgical site infections and other surgical complications. The NPT aims to create a clinical community: An enduring network of organizations accountable for efficient and effective sharing of knowledge, and supportive of improvement and innovation. This community includes a vertical core of national experts and project leaders, including faculty from the Armstrong Institute for Patient safety and Quality, the American College of Surgeons, the University of Pennsylvania, and the World Health Organization; and a horizontal core of peer hospitals and coordinating entities (CEs), such as state hospital associations and Hospital Engagement Networks (HENs). The NPT is learning how to tailor and disseminate this surgical safety project in a complex healthcare environment with frontline clinicians and CEs that are more overextended than ever before.

The NPT is eager to tell its story, enable AHRQ to assess project progress, and work with partners including AHRQ to improve the project. Through the production of this report, the NPT seeks to achieve three goals:

1.  Describe SUSP project recruitment and evaluation methods for key project outcomes

2.  Provide interim available data on recruitment, safety culture, SSI and ethnography site visits

3.  Identify opportunities to adapt and improve the project during remaining option periods

Methods

Hospital Recruitment

The recruitment plan has evolved over time to enable broader participation in the project. As in other national collaborative projects, enrollment is open for a specified period of time (in this case 2 months per recruitment period) and hospitals enrolling during the same period are organized into cohorts. In brief, participation in cohorts one through three was limited to hospitals reporting SSI for colorectal surgeries to ACS-NSQIP and/or NHSN. Beginning with cohort four, all interested acute care hospitals across the US and Puerto Rico, including those currently enrolled in SUSP, may enroll teams from any surgical service line (e.g., general, orthopedic, neurosurgeries, etc).

Recruitment Plan

Recruitment began in the project’s base year, and is ongoing. The NPT designed SUSP so that participating hospitals could initially focus on SSI reduction in colorectal surgery. The NPT hypothesized that hospital teams, through implementation of effective improvement methods, could demonstrate significant SSI reduction due to relatively high infection rates following colorectal surgery. Hospital teams could then apply tested improvement methods to other service lines and surgical complications.

NPT members also felt strongly that they should minimize over-extended hospital teams’ data collection burden, and began developing a system to transfer colorectal SSI data from existing databases into the SUSP database. Due to this data transfer plan, the NPT initially instructed CEs to recruit NSQIP-participating hospitals into the first SUSP cohort, and encouraged all hospitals to join in subsequent cohorts. This approach was designed to ensure the acquisition of valid baseline data from hospital teams, and gave the NPT time to develop minimally burdensome data requirements for subsequent states and teams that were not NSQIP participants. Beginning with the second SUSP cohort, the NPT opened project recruitment to hospitals submitting colorectal SSI data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN).

The NPT learned during the base year that some hospital teams enrolled in SUSP were already applying project concepts to reduce SSI in other types of surgical procedures (e.g. orthopedic or neurosurgeries). The NPT believes, as these teams demonstrated, that SUSP is agnostic to surgical line, and has encouraged hospital teams performing any type of surgery to join cohort four. As a result, the NPT expects to enroll a larger number of hospitals into cohort four and subsequent cohorts.

SUSP Portal and Database

The NPT worked with a vendor (CECity.com, Inc.) to develop the SUSP project portal as a central resource for project content and data, and a link to a project-specific social networking site. The portal includes the SUSP project database, a central repository of data that is used to support project-related quality improvement initiatives and evaluate the impact of SUSP initiatives on perioperative safety climate and SSI rates. Participating hospitals or their designated representative, such as the CE, submit hospital safety climate and SSI data to the database for analysis and reporting. The results presented in this report are based on analyses conducted with data drawn from the database in July 2013.

Safety Climate Measurement (Hospital Survey on Patient Safety [HSOPS])

An important early step in the CUSP process includes systematically measuring or in some other way understanding the Safety Climate of the work area in which improvement efforts are unfolding. Baseline data regarding perioperative Safety Climate were collected using the HSOPS survey, the publically available survey instrument developed by Westat under funding from AHRQ (Sorra & Neiva, 2004). The survey measures 10 dimensions of Safety Climate, 3 self-rated outcomes related to safety climate (e.g., overall patient safety grade, overall perceptions of patient safety), and also demographic data. The survey, while given to individuals within the unit, is designed to measure group-level perception of safety climate within respective work areas, therefore, data were aggregated to the work area level-of-analysis for reporting purposes and interim analyses. Participating teams could contribute HSOPS data in one of two ways: (1) collect real-time HSOPS data using the online SUSP data collection platform, or (2) upload previously collected HSOPS data if collected in the previous 12 calendar months and were available at the individual respondent level.

Surgical Site Infection Rate Reporting

Participating hospitals may submit SSI data from NHSN, NSQIP or both. Adjusted (six-month aggregate) and unadjusted (monthly aggregate) data for superficial, deep and organ space SSI can be transferred into the SUSP database. For NHSN data, either the CE or hospital administrator exports SSI data out of NHSN and imports data into the SUSP project database. For NSQIP data, ACS transfers SSI data to the NPT, who then imports it into the SUSP project database.

SUSP project SSI data reporting mirrored the successful data reporting process utilized in the On the CUSP: Stop BSI project. Once the data is submitted, both CEs and hospital administrators are able to view their data in the SUSP registry through both the application (app) performance monitor as well as the network performance monitor. Both of these views allow the CE and hospital administrators to the monitor the numerator (infections) and denominator (cases) of their hospitals. They can also view trend graphs, peer comparators, and percentile rankings. Web-based reports are available to participants to provide current information to be shared with SUSP teams. The NPT encourages hospital teams to share SSI data internally, e.g. posting data in surgical unit break rooms.

Ethnographic Methods and Process

Ethnographic research is a method for addressing the tension between a plan and its implementation. The ethnographic team of social scientists from the University of Pennsylvania has focused on studying how frontline workers make sense of their work world and create the patterns discovered through statistical analysis of aggregated quantitative data sets. The qualitative component of the SUSP project is aimed at gaining insight into how frontline providers interpret and implement the project locally at their sites. The research has captured numerous stories about successes and setbacks at creating change.

The ethnography team recruited sites for ethnographic visits through a weekly listserv to CEs and have been able to accommodate all of the volunteers so far. To date, the ethnography team has visited 12 hospitals in four states. The sites include academic, critical access, and community hospitals. Three ethnographers have spent a combined 15 days of site visits overall. At each site, they observed the Pre-Op, OR, and PACU areas, and often the Sterile Processing Departments. In addition to their observations, they conducted over 100 individual and group interviews, ranging from 10 minutes to 2 hours. They have attended SUSP meetings, met with SUSP leadership, and interviewed individuals, from front-line personnel to executive leadership.

Results

State and Hospital Recruitment

The SUSP project has enrolled three active cohorts (Table 1). Cohort one was enrolled during the base year, cohorts two and three were enrolled during option year one, and recruitment for cohort four was opened in August 2013. Project activity for cohort 4 will begin in October 2013 during option year two. To date, a total of 159 hospitals have enrolled in the SUSP project. Cohort two contains 97 hospitals from 10 coordinating entities, and includes both NSQIP-participating hospitals and those that participate in NHSN. Cohort three contains 51 hospitals from six coordinating entities.

Figure 1 highlights the states from which hospitals have been enrolled into the SUSP project. To date, a total of 12 CEs have enrolled in the project and organized participating hospitals within their state or organization. Participating CEs, and the number of hospitals affiliated with each, may be found in Table 1. The Armstrong Institute is serving as CE for hospitals that did not have a participating CE at the time of enrollment.

Figure 1. State Participation in CUSP for Safe Surgery, by Coordinating Entity

Arkansas Hospital Association / Hawaii Safer Care SUSP Collaborative
Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety & Quality / Iowa Healthcare Collaborative
Colorado Hospital Association / Maryland Hospital Association
Connecticut Hospital Association / Michigan Health & Hospital Association
Florida Hospital Association / Nevada Health Insight
Georgia Hospital Association / Tennessee Hospital Association

Table 1. Hospital Participation in CUSP for Safe Surgery, by Coordinating Entity and Cohort