Who’s Who in the Ambulatory Surgery Industry

Collaborative Organizations

JCAHO’s Ambulatory Surgery Advisory Council

The Joint commission on accreditation of Healthcare organizations (JcaHo) ambulatory surgery advisory council is an advisory council specific to the asc industry. The 21-member council provides ambulatory care and office-based surgery professionals with ongoing opportunity to offer advice and insight about the accreditation process and help to affect meaningful change.

“The real purpose of this is to create a venue for the Joint commission to get firsthand from our accreditation customers a review of the environment; what’s going on in the field business-wise, reimbursement-wise that in some way could impact their accreditation process or their ability to make the decision to stay accredited,” explains Michael Kulczycki, executive director of the ambulatory care program at the Joint commission.

JcaHo seeks feedback from the council on a variety of subjects, such as suggestions for improving the accreditation process, enhancements to standards to improve patient care and patient safety, legislative and regulatory changes, and an assessment of business and marketplace trends. They also advise on the JcaHo national Patient safety goals, as they apply to the asc industry.

“our experts internally, that are driving the development of those goals, get enlightened about how a potential goal area is either implementable in an ambulatory setting or maybe is not or maybe needs adjustment to reflect the uniqueness of the asc environment.”

The council “creates a pipeline to the most important industry segment to ensure that we take some feedback and input when we are considering change to our processes,” Kulczycki adds. “it really establishes a better two-way communication vehicle and enables the asc industry to speak directly with senior officers of JcaHo on issues specific to them.”

The council meets three times a year; once in person and twice by conference call. They also stay in contact via email and phone calls throughout the year.

ASC Quality Collaboration

A special acknowledgement goes to the members of The ASC Quality Collaboration, a leadership group composed of leaders from every sector of the ambulatory surgery industry and related associations. The group’s goal is to identify specific measures for quality that are appropriate to ASCs. A set of quality measurements that may serve as standards throughout the industry could be used for discussing pay-for-performance, for state data collection initiatives, for providing consumer information, and for benchmarking for quality improvement. An expert workgroup includes ASC clinical and administrative leaders, health policy researchers, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and other federal and state agencies. The workgroup has already identified measures that are currently in use, required or under development by the industry or other quality organizations. These include the National Quality Forum, the Surgical Care Improvement Project, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care, the Ambulatory Care Quality Alliance, and Surgical Quality Alliance. The ASC Quality Collaboration is working with CMS to make these quality measures a key element of the revamped ASC payment system that is expected to be implemented in January 2008.

“We are determining how, as a group, we can standardize quality and patient safety in the ambulatory industry,” says collaboration coordinator Donna Slosburg, BSN, LHRM, CASC. “Until now, there has not been standardization of definitions or criteria for these across the industry.”

The measures have been submitted to the National Quality Forum, and she says, the collaboration hopes the forum will approve these goals so they can be disseminated to the industry next spring. The leadership group on the ASC Quality Collaboration includes: Cliff Adlerz, president, Symbion; Kathy Bryant, president, FASA; John Burke, PhD, executive director and CEO, Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC); Joe Clark, president, HealthSouth; Tom Hall, president, NovaMed; David Hunt, MD, medical officer, CMS Quality Improvement Group; Craig Jeffries, executive director, American Association Ambulatory Surgery Centers (AAASC); Bill Jessee, MD, president and CEO, Medical Group Management Association (MGMA); Michael Kulczycki, executive director, Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) Ambulatory Surgery Division; Ken McDonald, president, AmSurg; Ellen K Murphy, MS, JD, FAAN, interim executive director, Association periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN); Richard Pence, chief operating officer, National Surgical Care; Tom Russell, executive director, American College of Surgeons (ACS); George Reuther, director, Division of Healthcare Facilities Accreditation of the American Osteopathic Association (AOA); John Schario, executive vice president, Nueterra; David Shapiro, MD, American Association Ambulatory Surgery Centers (AAASC); Donna Slosburg, BSN, LHRM, CASC, coordinator, ASC Quality Collaboration; and Bill Wilcox, president and chief executive officer, United Surgical Partners Inc (USPI).

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