QUIPS: Quality Improvement in Postoperative Pain Management

Despite the availability of high-quality guidelines and advanced pain management techniques acute postoperative pain management is still far from being satisfactory. The QUIPS (Quality Improvement in Postoperative Pain Management) project aims to improve treatment quality by means of standardised data acquisition, analysis of quality and process indicators, and feedback and benchmarking. During a pilot phase funded by the German Ministry of Health (BMG), a total of 12,389 data sets were collected from six participating hospitals. Outcome improved in four of the six hospitals. Process indicators, such as routine pain documentation, were only poorly correlated with outcomes. To date, more than 130 German hospitals use QUIPS as a routine quality management tool. An EC-funded parallel project disseminates the concept internationally. QUIPS demonstrates that patient-reported outcomes in postoperative pain management can be benchmarked in routine clinical practice. Quality improvement initiatives should use outcome instead of structural and process parameters. The concept is transferable to other fields of medicine.