Creating Individual Surgeon Performance Assessments in a Statewide Hospital Surgical Quality Improvement Collaborative

Few individual surgeon performance outliers could be detected in NSQIP clinical registry data for a statewide hospital collaborative over a 30-month period using postoperative patient outcomes. Low surgeon-specific case volumes and minimal variance between surgeons may limit the utility of American College of Surgeons NSQIP outcomes measures for individual profiling. Alternative metrics, such as process measures, patient experience, composite measures, or technical skill assessments should be explored for surgeon-level measurement.