The Codman Center for Clinical Effectiveness in Surgery: Measuring and Improving the Quality of Surgical Care

Matthew Hutter, MD, MBA, MPH, is director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Weight Center and medical director of the Codman Center. In this video, he discusses the Codman Center and how it achieves its mission to deliver the safest, highest value patient care through innovative research and education.

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Transcript

The Codman Center for Clinical Effectiveness and Surgery at the Mass General Hospital is named after Dr. Ernest Amory Codman, so Dr. Codman really is the founder of outcomes research. He called it the end-results idea, but it was basically the commonsense idea that people should measure what they're doing so that they can improve upon that. That idea in the 1900s was novel, and right now we've really taken this full-on in order to measure and improve the quality of care throughout the Department of Surgery and through other surgical services as well.

So at the Codman Center, what we do is we focus on the quality and safety program, just integrating data collection programs into patient care using national programs when appropriate, developing our own when not appropriate, to basically track and measure the quality of care that each patient receives and each surgeon provides. A key aspect about collecting data is doing something about it, so what we do with the data at the Codman Center is we create reports to feedback the information, but also to help spur on quality improvement projects, so basically when we get these risk-adjusted benchmark reports, we can identify areas for opportunity and then target those areas, do interventions and see if they improve the quality of care. That has been quite rewarding, to track and monitor the progress over time and to really make an impact on some of the areas that can require improvement in the hospital.

And what we've seen over time is that with continuous quality improvement, we're able to increase the quality of care that's being provided. At Mass General, we have lots of successes, and we've identified that in cardiac surgery with restart results which is the highest with the national acclamation, and metabolic and bariatric surgery, colorectal surgery, trauma surgery—all these areas that we can highlight, but again it's this continuous quality improvement that we measure, we care, and we do something about it.

So Mass General is really a special place, not only to do research but to practice and to take care of patients, and I think that combination is what is truly unique about Mass General. We are truly focused on the patient, and when that patient gets the best care in the operating room—but when we can learn the lessons learned to train the next generation to do research in order to improve quality of care, not just at the Mass General but regionally across Massachusetts or New England or even nationally, well, that's when we really make a special impact, I think.

So what we do at the Codman Center, within our department [is] we try to expand across the state. So we're developing a Massachusetts surgical quality improvement collaborative in order to measure and improve the quality of care at the Massachusetts level. In New England, we've developed the New England Society of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery to improve the quality of care at the New England level. Nationwide, by working with professional societies, the American College of Surgeons and each one of the surgical professional societies, we can hopefully improve the care that's provided there as well.

About the Codman Center for Clinical Effectiveness in Surgery

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