you doing to ensure your infection rates are as low as possible? If you
are doing well, use that in your marketing, on your website, in your
brochures. If not, don't promote it, but use it to improve. Then make
sure you maintain that improvement."
All in this together
"ASCs were expecting this when it arrived," says Ms. Geier. "We'd
known it was coming when hospitals started having to collect and
report data."
A diverse panel of representatives from the ambulatory surgery
industry and healthcare quality organizations convened to discuss
data diligence. The result of those discussions, the ASC Quality
Collaboration (ascquality.org), arose to develop and publicly report
standardized ASC
quality measures just
ahead of the 2007 hep-
atitis C outbreak
sparked by shoddy
practices at a Las
Vegas endoscopy cen-
ter, an incident that
precipitated greater
government scrutiny
of ASC operations.
"We were proactively
involved and we were
ready when the gov-
ernment pulled the
trigger," says Ms.
Geier.
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