Baptist Medical Center South receives national recognition for surgical patient care from the American College of Surgeons

The American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP^®) has recognized Baptist Medical Center South as one of 90 ACS NSQIP participating hospitals that have achieved meritorious outcomes for surgical patient care in 2020. As a participant in ACS NSQIP, Baptist South is required to track the outcomes of inpatient and outpatient surgical procedures and collect data that assesses patient safety and can be used to direct improvement in the quality of surgical care.

The ACS NSQIP recognition program commends a select group of hospitals for achieving a meritorious composite score in either an "All Cases" category, or a category which includes only "High Risk" cases. Risk-adjusted data from the July 2021 ACS NSQIP Semiannual Report, which presents data from the 2020 calendar year, was used to determine which hospitals demonstrated meritorious outcomes. Baptist South is recognized on both the "All Cases" and "High Risk" Meritorious lists.

"We are tremendously proud of our surgical teams at Baptist South, who provide high-quality advanced medical care for our patients every day," said Kyle Dorsey, FACHE, hospital president of Baptist South. "This acknowledgment of our team's dedication to patient safety from The American College of Surgeons is a well-earned recognition of that team's dedication to patient safety."

Each composite score was determined through a different weighted formula combining eight outcomes. The outcome performances related to patient management were in the following eight clinical areas:

• mortality
• unplanned intubation
• ventilator >48 hours
• renal failure
• cardiac incidents (cardiac arrest and myocardial infarction)
• respiratory (pneumonia)
• SSI (surgical site infections-superficial and deep incisional and organ-space SSIs)
• urinary tract infection.

ACS NSQIP is the only nationally validated quality improvement program that measures and enhances the care of surgical patients. This program measures the actual surgical results 30 days postoperatively, as well as risk adjusts patient characteristics to compensate for differences among patient populations and acuity levels. The goal of ACS NSQIP is to reduce surgical morbidity (infection or illness related to a surgical procedure) and surgical mortality (death related to a surgical procedure) and to provide a firm foundation for surgeons to apply what is known as the "best scientific evidence" to the practice of surgery. Furthermore, when adverse effects from surgical procedures are reduced and/or eliminated, a reduction in health care costs follows. ACS NSQIP is a major program of the American College of Surgeons and is currently used in nearly 850 adult and pediatric hospitals.