Anesthesia Business Consultants designated as AQI Preferred Vendor

Anesthesia Business Consultants, LLC (ABC) is pleased and proud to announce that they are one of the first companies to meet the criteria for designation as an Anesthesia Quality Institute (AQI) Preferred Vendor. As stated on the AQI web site, www.aqihq.org,

“At ABC, not only do we focus all of our daily efforts on elevating our clients to the next level, but we also strive to assist them in achieving the best clinical outcomes, decreasing administrative efforts, and streamlining communication with all stakeholders”

An 'AQI Preferred Vendor' is a healthcare information technology company with a product that is actively meeting AQI requirements for data transfer. These criteria, which are expected to change on an annual basis, include the depth of data submitted (meeting the 2010 AQI Minimal Data Set standards at the least), the breadth of data (all cases performed), the formatting (in accordance with the AQI-defined schema), and the timeliness (at least quarterly).

AQI is the separate 501(c)(3) organization launched last year by the American Society of Anesthesiologists to develop the National Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes Registry (NACOR), a clinical data registry that will ideally have information on every anesthesia procedure performed in the U.S. The data collected from practices and hospitals will encompass group and facility size and other demographics, patient and procedure data and outcomes such as complications, recovery time and patient satisfaction.

The anticipated benefits for anesthesiologists who participate in NACOR include:

1. Personal benchmarking - over time, within group, within subspecialty, etc.
2. Quality reporting - PQRI measures and others
3. Hospital credentialing
4. Maintenance of licensure
5. Maintenance of certification
6. Clinical research

Registries such as the one that the AQI is developing have both a long history in medicine and an unbounded future. Twenty-seven states plus the District of Columbia have enacted reporting systems to help physicians identify and learn from serious adverse events. Sixteen of them significantly revised their reporting systems or registries between 2005 and 2007 alone, according to the National Quality Forum - of whose Quality Measurement & Improvement Council the AQI recently became a member.

Among other recent activities, the AQI is in the process of obtaining official CMS registry status for NACOR so that anesthesiologists submitting quality data to NACOR will be able to use the registry method of reporting to the PQRI.

"At ABC, not only do we focus all of our daily efforts on elevating our clients to the next level, but we also strive to assist them in achieving the best clinical outcomes, decreasing administrative efforts, and streamlining communication with all stakeholders," says ABC President and CEO, Tony Mira. "We are proud that our tireless works have helped us to achieve this preferred vendor designation."