Quality Council zeroes in on Appropriate Use Criteria

Jan 03, 2021 Re-posted from the January 2021 issue of Vascular Specialist

By Beth Bales

The Quality Council has earmarked a major initiative for 2021, and it will involve sponsorship of the first official set of SVS Appropriate Use Criteria guidelines, focusing on claudication.

The criteria are intended to provide guidance for decision making in real-world clinical scenarios.

SVS created the Quality Council—which is chaired by Larry Kraiss, MD—in 2018 to coordinate and integrate the quality-related activities occurring in various places within the Society.

Clinical Practice Guidelines are a close relative of the criteria, and their development was recently added to the council portfolio, Kraiss explains.

This allows the SVS to closely coordinate creation of both Clinical Practice Guidelines and the Appropriate Use Criteria guidelines for important vascular topics. An update to the former for claudication will also be written in 2021.

The Vascular Quality Initiative (VQI) is also part of the Quality Council. An ongoing major objective will be to harmonize both sets of guidelines with the VQI in a way that VQI participants can demonstrate compliance, Kraiss elaborates.

“We want to position the SVS as a model professional society with regard to the close coordination of data-driven Clinical Practice Guidelines and Appropriate Use Criteria, along with the ability to use the VQI to measure whether compliance with those guidelines produces better patient outcomes,” adds Kraiss.

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