Lehigh Valley Hospital–Cedar Crest Receives Highest Recognition for Improving Vascular Care for Patients

For the second consecutive year Lehigh Valley Hospital (LVH)–Cedar Crest has been awarded three stars, the highest number possible, from the Society for Vascular Surgery Patient Safety Organization (SVS PSO). This designation recognizes commitment to “improving care and fostering engagement with vascular patients.”

The SVS PSO is the organization that oversees the Vascular Quality Initiative® (VQI). The VQI is a national initiative with a mission to improve the quality and safety of vascular care. It does this by collecting, analyzing and sharing data from participating organizations. The data focuses on preoperative risk factors, intraprocedural variables, outcomes and follow-up data from a year after procedures.

Participation in VQI allows Lehigh Valley Heart and Vascular Institute to develop and maintain best practices and work to continually improve quality and patient safety.

Ben Jackson, MD, Chief of Vascular Surgery at Lehigh Valley Heart and Vascular Institute, credits many members of the team with helping to earn this recognition.

“Credit goes to Ronald Freudenberger, MD, for supporting our participation in the VQI registry; Mila Ju, MD, for leading our quality and safety programs; and Mercedes Scott, Bryan Nelson and Tricia Shelly for all their hard work in achieving this recognition,” Dr. Jackson says. “It validates our clinical activities, our patient care and operative procedures.”

Dr. Ju explained that the Heart and Vascular Institute’s participation in VQI has expanded over the years to include multiple registries and multiple hospital sites within the network. “Our participation with VQI started when it was mandatory for our TCAR (transcarotid artery revascularization) cases and it has continued to grow. It provides us with essential data to improve the care of our patients,” she says.

Criteria for the award includes:

• The organization completes long-term, follow-up reporting based on the percentage of patients for whom they have at least nine months of follow-up data.
• Members of the organization attend meetings of a regional quality group and VQI.
• Initiation of quality improvement activities based on VQI data
• The number of vascular registries in which the center participates

The SVS PSO has overseen the VQI since 2011 when it was approved to do so by the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ). VQI members include 4,000+ participating physicians across vascular surgery, and other specialties like cardiothoracic surgery, neurosurgery, radiology and general surgery. With more than 850 participating centers in North America and Singapore, VQI has captured data from over 800,000 procedures.