In 2014, the Anesthesia Quality Institute’s NACOR was named a Qualified Clinical Data Registry (QCDR) by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). A QCDR is a CMS-approved entity that collects medical and/or clinical data for the purpose of patient and disease tracking to foster improvement in the quality of care furnished to patients.1 This designation allowed for the first specialty-specific outcome measures to be reportable under the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), the federal program that encourages medical professionals to report information on the quality of care they provide.
Prior to 2014, the only measures applicable to general anesthesia providers under the PQRS were process measures, such as administration of prophylactic antibiotics.2 Process measures assess the activities carried out by health care professionals, reflect how care is provided, and are direct measures of quality of care only when a link has been demonstrated between a given...
