The Society for Vascular Surgery Vascular Quality Initiative

The Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) Vascular Quality Initiative (VQI) is designed to improve the quality, safety, effectiveness, and cost of vascular health care. It uses the structure of a Patient Safety Organization to permit collection of patient-identified information but protect benchmarked comparisons from legal discovery. The SVS VQI is uniquely organized as a distributed network of regional quality groups to facilitate local translation of registry data into practice change while maintaining the power of a national registry. Detailed data specific to each commonly performed open and endovascular procedure are collected, both in-hospital and at >= 1 year of follow-up. Quality measures are reported to physicians and hospitals, which allow anonymous risk-adjusted benchmarking within regions or nationally. All specialties that perform vascular procedures are included, and international participation is encouraged. This review describes the current status of the SVS VQI. (J Vasc Surg 2012;55:1529-37.)