NSQIP Data Abstraction Services
Managing data for the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP) is essential but can be a complex and time-consuming task for healthcare facilities. Our specialized NSQIP data abstraction services are designed to alleviate this burden, allowing your team to focus on providing exceptional patient care and improving surgical outcomes.
What is NSQIP?
The National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) is a nationally validated, risk-adjusted, outcomes-based program aimed at measuring and enhancing the quality of surgical care. Managed by the American College of Surgeons (ACS NSQIP), it collects clinical, risk-adjusted, 30-day outcomes data in a nationally benchmarked database. This helps hospitals and surgeons identify areas for improvement, implement changes, and ultimately enhance patient outcomes while reducing complications and costs.
Efficient and Accurate NSQIP Post-Discharge Follow-Up Calls
In healthcare, tracking patient outcomes post-discharge is crucial for providing comprehensive care and reducing unnecessary readmissions. Leading registries like ACS NSQIP recognize this, requiring follow-ups 30 days after primary procedure to capture critical data on complications and recovery. By ensuring a complete picture of patient care, these follow-ups can significantly lower readmission rates and associated costs.
ADN excels in data abstraction and post-discharge follow-up through meticulous chart audits and patient outreach. Our expertise ensures accurate, timely data collection, empowering healthcare providers to enhance patient outcomes and operational efficiency.Managing post-discharge follow-up calls for the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) can be one of the most labor-intensive aspects of surgical data collection. These calls are essential to capturing post-operative outcomes, ensuring that hospitals remain compliant with NSQIP’s stringent data requirements. However, this process often requires a call-center-like operation and multilingual support to effectively reach a diverse patient population—adding layers of complexity that many healthcare teams struggle to manage in-house.
American Data Network (ADN) provides a comprehensive smartsourcing solution for managing these critical follow-up calls. Our specialized team takes on the full scope of the follow-up process, ensuring:
- Timely Patient Contact: We handle all patient follow-up calls within the required window, ensuring that no data is missed.
- Multilingual Support: With the ability to provide translation services, we ensure that language barriers do not impact the quality or accuracy of the data collected.
- NSQIP Compliance: We follow NSQIP’s exact standards for data collection, ensuring that all case forms and follow-up information are compliant and timely.
By leveraging ADN’s expertise in managing follow-up calls, hospitals can eliminate the need for internal call centers, reduce administrative burdens, and focus their internal resources on more strategic initiatives like improving patient outcomes and quality of care.
Comprehensive NSQIP Abstraction Services
Our NSQIP data abstraction services include:
- Case Selection: Identification of eligible surgical cases according to NSQIP guidelines, ensuring that the correct patient populations are included for accurate reporting and analysis.
- Data Abstraction: Systematic and thorough abstraction of required data elements from patient records, including preoperative risk factors, intraoperative variables, and postoperative outcomes.
- Quality Assurance: Continuous quality checks and inter-rater reliability assessments to maintain the highest levels of accuracy.
- Post-Discharge Follow-Up: Comprehensive management of follow-up calls to patients, ensuring data collection within 30 days of the primary procedure and providing multilingual support when necessary.
Why Choose Our NSQIP Data Abstraction Services?
Expert Team with Deep Clinical Knowledge
Our team consists of seasoned professionals with extensive experience in NSQIP data abstraction. Many of our abstractors are former nurses and quality managers who understand the complexities of surgical procedures and documentation. Their expertise ensures compliance with all ACS NSQIP requirements and contributes to the high accuracy of data abstraction.
Improve Data Accuracy and Reliability
Accurate data abstraction is the backbone of the NSQIP program. This data is used to generate risk-adjusted reports that help hospitals compare their performance against national benchmarks. Accurate data ensures that the insights derived are reliable, enabling effective quality improvement initiatives. Our rigorous training programs and quality control processes, including our industry-leading inter rater reliability process, ensure that the data we abstract is precise and reliable. We maintain an accuracy rate of 98% or higher across all clients and registries, meeting the highest standards of the NSQIP program.
Flexible Solutions to Reduce Administrative Burden
We offer flexible and scalable solutions to fit your specific needs, whether you require assistance with only certain registry data abstraction or comprehensive support across all your abstraction workload. Our services are designed to integrate seamlessly with your existing workflows. Plus, outsourcing your NSQIP data abstraction to us significantly reduces the workload on your clinical staff. This allows your team to dedicate more time to critical patient care tasks and quality improvement initiatives, rather than the labor-intensive process of data collection and completion.
NSQIP Data Abstraction Case Study:
Smartsourcing NSQIP Data Abstraction and Follow-Up Calls at a Large Northeast Health System
The Challenge
A large northeast health system was grappling with how to staff its entire data abstraction workload amid a critical staffing shortage, with over 100 open nursing positions. Managing multiple registries, including the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP), became increasingly difficult. NSQIP posed an even greater challenge with its requirement for post-operative follow-up calls, which were labor-intensive and required multilingual support to communicate with a diverse patient population. Handling these follow-up calls in-house would have required setting up a call center-like operation, placing further strain on an already overstretched team.
Results with ADN’s Smartsourcing
To address these challenges, the health system partnered with American Data Network (ADN), leveraging ADN’s smartsourcing model to handle NSQIP abstraction as well as the demanding NSQIP follow-up calls process, thus freeing up internal resources for patient care. ADN took on the entire follow-up workload, including:
- Meeting all NSQIP compliance requirements, ensuring that the appropriate case selection process was adhered to according to ACS guidelines, and that data was abstracted and completed on time.
- Managing all follow-up calls to ensure that due diligence in reaching the patient within 30 days of the primary procedure was achieved.
- Providing multilingual support to ensure data accuracy across all demographics.
By partnering with ADN, they were able to:
- Ensure accurate and timely abstraction completion with ADN’s expert team managing the case selection and abstraction process as well as follow-up calls, utilizing translation services as indicated.
- Eliminate the burden of handling NSQIP follow-up calls internally, allowing their team to focus on more strategic initiatives.
- Avoid building an in-house call center, reducing both staffing costs and operational complexity.
A Strategic Partnership
ADN’s smartsourcing approach provided the health system with a reliable and efficient solution for managing their NSQIP follow-up process. By offloading this complex task, the organization was able to maintain data quality and compliance while redirecting their internal resources to focus on what truly matters—patient care and performance improvement.
Benefits of Outsourcing NSQIP Registrar Abstraction
Cost Savings
Our per-chart pricing model offers a cost-effective solution, reducing expenses related to hiring, training, and maintaining an in-house team dedicated to NSQIP data abstraction. Facilities can reallocate these resources to other critical areas.
Enhanced Focus on Quality Improvement
With the administrative burden lifted, your clinical staff can concentrate on analyzing data and implementing strategies to improve surgical outcomes. This leads to better patient care and higher overall performance metrics.
Scalability and Flexibility
Our services are scalable to meet your facility’s needs. Whether you experience seasonal fluctuations or are expanding your surgical programs, we can adjust our services accordingly.
Proven Track Record
American Data Network (ADN) has a proven track record of excellence in clinical data abstraction. Our clients have experienced significant improvements in data accuracy, cost savings, and overall operational efficiency. Additionally, ADN was named one of the Top 10 Most Trusted Healthcare Companies in 2024 by The Healthcare Insights. This recognition underscores ADN’s commitment to excellence and trustworthiness in the healthcare industry. See the full article here.
Expertise in Surgical Registry Abstraction
Our abstraction experts are well-versed in the nuances of surgical data collection, including familiarity with the NSQIP data dictionary and variable definitions. This expertise ensures that your data is consistent, accurate, and compliant with program standards.
Seamless Integration with Your NSQIP Data Abstraction Processes
We work closely with your team to ensure our abstraction services integrate seamlessly with your existing workflows and electronic health record (EHR) systems. We have extensive experience with all the major EHRs. Our goal is to provide a smooth transition and continuous support, making the data abstraction process efficient and stress-free.
“When we made the transition to ADN, it was probably one of the smoothest transitions from any vendor standpoint. And I’m not just talking about abstraction. We use vendors for lots of things in hospitals. It was a very, very smooth transition to onboard all of the work that we’d previously been doing with another vendor.”
Read the full Data Abstraction Case Study here.
Assistant Vice President of Quality & Patient Safety, Brenda Bruneau, MBA, RN
Loma Linda University Health
Join Our Team: NSQIP Abstraction Jobs
At ADN, we are always looking for talented and dedicated professionals to join our team of NSQIP data experts. If you have a passion for improving patient outcomes and a strong background in NSQIP, we invite you to explore career opportunities with us. You’ll play a crucial role in ensuring the accuracy and integrity of NSQIP data, contributing to life-saving improvements in healthcare. We offer competitive compensation, ongoing professional development, and the opportunity to work with a team of experienced professionals who are leaders in the field. Apply today to become part of a dynamic organization committed to excellence in NSQIP registry abstraction services.
FAQs about NSQIP Abstraction Services
The National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) is a program by the American College of Surgeons aimed at measuring and improving the quality of surgical care. It collects clinical data to provide risk-adjusted, 30-day outcomes, helping hospitals and surgeons identify areas for improvement.
The NSQIP Surgical Risk Calculator is a tool that estimates the risk of postoperative complications for individual patients based on specific variables such as age, comorbidities, and type of surgery. It aids clinicians in preoperative planning and informed consent discussions.
Per-chart abstraction times vary based on the NSQIP registry type. For example, NSQIP cases can range on average from 30 to 60 minutes per chart, depending on the complexity of the case and the experience of the abstractor. Factors that can affect abstraction times include case complexity, length of stay (LOS), quality and consistency of EHR documentation, abstractor training and turnover, and job-related distractions or interruptions.
Our NSQIP data abstractors undergo comprehensive and rigorous training to ensure the highest standards of accuracy and efficiency. Our training program includes:
- Testing and Vetting: We start with a stringent testing and vetting process for all potential hires to ensure only those with a solid background and experience in clinical data abstraction join our team.
- Initial Training: Abstractors undergo initial training to familiarize themselves with our specific processes, client needs, and NSQIP registry requirements. This includes detailed instruction on data abstraction techniques, coding standards, and client-specific guidelines.
- Ongoing Education: To keep up with evolving NSQIP registry standards and guidelines, our abstractors participate in continuous education. This includes regular updates on changes to registry guidelines, new best practices, and advancements in data abstraction technology.
- Quality Assurance: We implement strict quality assurance measures, including regular inter-rater reliability (IRR) assessments, to ensure our abstractors maintain the highest levels of accuracy and consistency in their work.
- Hands-On Experience: Our training includes practical, hands-on experience with real-world NSQIP data abstraction scenarios. This helps our abstractors develop the skills and confidence needed to handle the complexities of NSQIP data abstraction efficiently.
- Support and Feedback: Our abstractors receive ongoing support and feedback from our team of experienced professionals, including one-on-one mentoring, regular performance reviews, and access to resources that help them continuously improve their skills.
Our abstractors have extensive experience in healthcare, including roles as nurses and quality team members. Many hold credentials such as Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality (CPHQ) and have specialized training in NSQIP data abstraction. NSQIP abstractors must be certified, holding a Surgical Clinical Reviewer (SCR) credential.
We implement strict quality assurance measures, including regular inter-rater reliability (IRR) assessments. Our continuous training and quality checks ensure that our abstractors maintain the highest levels of accuracy and consistency. We maintain an accuracy rate of 98% or higher across all clients and registries, meeting the highest standards of the NSQIP program.
Yes, our service includes comprehensive support for NSQIP registry management, including overseeing program requirements, abstraction specifications, submission deadlines, reporting, and data validation.
We can typically begin the abstraction process within 2-4 weeks after finalizing the agreement, depending on your facility’s specific needs and the complexity of the data. Access to necessary systems including EHR and data collection tool access play a role into how soon our team can get started.
Outsourcing NSQIP registry abstraction offers several key benefits:
- Enhanced Data Accuracy: Expert abstractors ensure precise and consistent data collection.
- Cost Savings: Reduces expenses related to hiring and training in-house teams.
- Focus on Quality Improvement: Allows clinical staff to concentrate on patient care initiatives.
- Scalability: Quickly adjust to changes in workload and registry requirements.
- Reduced Staff Stress: Lowers workload on in-house staff, enhancing job satisfaction.
We adhere to all HIPAA regulations and have strict data security protocols in place. All data is transmitted securely, and our staff are trained in confidentiality and compliance.
Healthcare analytics Tools & resources
Free Outsourcing Cost-Benefit Analysis Template
As many facilities are evaluating how to utilize scarce clinical resources, reallocating data abstraction staff to quality improvement and outsourcing abstraction positions can shave critical budget dollars. American Data Network’s “Outsourcing Cost-Benefit Analysis Template” can help you determine the true cost of your in-house data abstraction process. In under three minutes, this tool will show you and your leadership team total savings and where they will come from using real data and expert resources.
Get Started with Our NSQIP Data Abstraction Services
Ready to enhance your NSQIP data collection process and improve surgical outcomes? Contact us today to learn how our services can benefit your facility. Our team is here to provide the support you need to achieve your quality and patient care goals.
Contact Us Today: Fill out our contact form or call us at 501-225-5533 to discuss how we can support your NSQIP data abstraction needs.
Outsourcing your NSQIP data abstraction burden to American Data Network means you can focus more on your core competency of improving patient care rather than on the tedious task of routine data collection. Our experienced team ensures accuracy, compliance, and efficiency, helping you meet your registry requirements with ease.