Assessing the Implementation of American College of Surgeons Quality Indicators for Pancreatic Cancer Across an Integrated Health System.

The American College of Surgeons (ACS) recently published quality assurance (QA) indicators for pancreatic cancer care. Implementing quality indicators in a newly formed health system may lead to better patient selection and standardized cancer care. Select ACS and internal quality indicators were implemented system wide in 2014. We compared compliance with these measures before and after their implementation at the main hospital and two new affiliate institutions. A total of 506 patients with pancreatic cancer were included. At the main hospital in the pre-QA period, 11 (12.6%) of 87 patients were discussed at our institutional multidisciplinary tumor board meeting; this number rose to 89 (49.7%) of 179 patients ( The implementation of ACS quality indicators at our main hospital was feasible and effective for several measures, without delaying treatment. Instituting these indicators at lower-volume affiliates was more challenging.