Newswise — NeuroPoint Alliance (NPA) recently welcomed three new hospitals and health systems to the Quality Outcomes Database (QOD) program. CentraCare Health, St. Cloud, Minn.; Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Lebanon, N.H.; and Aurora BayCare Medical Center, Green Bay, Wis. have joined over 100 existing QOD participating centers, several of which have been collecting data since 2012.
The QOD serves as the nationwide prospective clinical registry for neurosurgical procedures and practice patterns. The primary purpose of the QOD is to track the quality of surgical care for the most common neurosurgical procedures, as well as to provide individual surgeons, practice groups, hospitals and health systems with an immediate infrastructure for analyzing and reporting the quality of their neurosurgical care.
“I am very pleased to implement the QOD registry program here after having been the QOD Surgeon Champion at Covenant Medical Center in northern Iowa and, later, at the University of Kansas Medical Center” says Timothy Ryken, MD, FAANS, Chief of Neurosurgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock. “Covenant in Iowa was one of the charter sites for QOD-Lumbar back in 2012. I then introduced QOD to the Ortho Spine group at the University of Kansas.”
“A robust quality program is an imperative in today’s health care environment,” he continued, “and this is some of the most important work going on in neurosurgery today. Here at Dartmouth, QOD is a joint effort of the Dartmouth Integrated Spine Care group, which includes members of Neurosurgery, Pain and Orthopedic Spine Surgery. QOD has, in each of these instances, given us the necessary information to help us align patient care in a quality-focused way.” In his capacity as Surgeon Champion, Dr. Ryken will continue to serve on the QOD Operations Committee and help other centers to learn from his years of active involvement and support.
Jerone Kennedy, MD, FAANS, who serves as Medical Director of Neurovascular Surgery at St. Cloud Hospital and as Physician Section Director of Neurosciences for CentraCare Health said, “St. Cloud Hospital is thrilled to start enrollment of patients into QOD. CentraCare Health has truly committed to the Triple Aim. As such, it is necessary that we collect and report neurosurgery-specific quality and outcomes data.” He added, “Combining this information with cost data will then allow us to objectively measure, report and improve the value of neurosurgical care delivered to Central Minnesota.”
NeuroPoint Alliance is confident the addition of these new participants will help the QOD continue to provide the platform for local and national quality improvement initiatives that empower physicians to deliver world-class healthcare.
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About NPA
The NeuroPoint Alliance (NPA) was established in 2008 by the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) to collect, analyze and report on nationwide clinical data from neurosurgical practices using online technologies. It is designed to meet the quality care and research needs of individual neurosurgeons and neurosurgical practices, national organizations, health care plans, the biomedical industry and government agencies. To learn more, visit www.neuropoint.org.
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