Boosting clinical performance to improve post-operative patient experience

Currently, Geisinger Medical Center in Danville does not have standard postoperative outcome measures in place following anesthesia or surgery to document patient satisfaction, complications or other outcomes. Our current process involves recoding limited data one day after some procedures. 

But without longitudinal data, there is no systematic way to allow patients with problems to promptly re-engage, discover suboptimal outcomes or delayed complications, or evaluate clinical practices on outcomes. More generally, longitudinal data would be valuable for assessment of all procedural outcomes and the anesthetic component of delivering procedural services. 

To address the lack of a systematic framework for collection of follow-up satisfaction and outcomes data, we are building efforts to implement a structured collection of quality assessments as well as patient recovery and patient satisfaction data for the immediate and long-term postoperative period. Since no baseline data are being captured, the creation of a custom framework along with custom survey development is necessary to assess general characteristics of patient outcomes over longer term postoperative periods. The accumulated data will be a unique resource for a variety of quality and process improvement initiatives.