Fifty Facts in Fifty Minutes: An Update From the Anesthesia Quality Institute

The Anesthesia Quality Institute (AQI) is a related organization of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA). The AQI was formed in 2009 to promote quality in anesthesia patient care through collection and dissemination of clinical practice data. The AQI created the National Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes Registry (NACOR) in 2010, and the Anesthesia Incident Reporting System (AIRS) in 2011, to accomplish this purpose. Data are collected from anesthesia practices and anesthesiologists across the United States and are aggregated to create benchmarks for clinical outcomes. Benchmarks encompass all aspects of anesthesia quality, including operational efficiency, safety, and patient experience. Practices contributing to the AQI receive continual online access to their own data, as well as comparators on the basis of practice size and type drawn from the whole of NACOR. Aggregated information describes the practice of anesthesiology in the United States, and is available to ASA and subspecialty society leaders. Selected cases from AIRS that illustrate emerging threats to patient safety are used to generate teaching articles in the ASA Newsletter, which is circulated to more than 50,000 anesthesiologists around the world. Contribution of case-specific data to NACOR and AIRS will be increasingly important to practices in the future, to meet multiple regulatory requirements. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief overview of the structure, mechanics, and current status of the AQI and its registries, and to present some of the aggregate data gathered to date.