Center for Perioperative Medicine Foundational Elements

Overview

As a medical specialty, Anesthesiology has established itself as a leader in patient safety and has enabled significant clinical advancements in surgery and other invasive procedures. Anesthesiology has played a critical role in ensuring the safety of patients in the operating room, where the highest acuity of care is delivered. Additionally, many anesthesiologists today also practice pain management, critical care medicine, and palliative medicine.

However, despite the extraordinary level of safety achieved in the intraoperative period, postoperative mortality and morbidity rates remain high. In fact, postoperative mortality is now considered the third leading cause of death in the United States. This is due in part to poor preoperative evaluation and optimization, uncoordinated care during the perioperative period, and a lack of a systemwide approach to postoperative care.

To address these issues, the ASA has created an ASA Center for Perioperative Medicine as an organizational strategy for the long-term development of ASA’s initiatives in perioperative medicine that encompasses the entire continuum of care in the perioperative setting. This care begins at the moment a patient is scheduled for surgery to their full recovery and beyond, including post-hospitalization care. The ASA Center for Perioperative Medicine aims to improve outcomes through coordinated care with a comprehensive and collaborative approach.

Definition of Perioperative Medicine

Perioperative Medicine is a multi-disciplinary approach that encompasses the whole continuum of care for patients undergoing surgery, interventions or invasive procedures. The goal of perioperative medicine is to improve patient outcomes and reduce morbidity and mortality rates throughout the entire perioperative period. This is achieved through collaboration among healthcare providers, including anesthesiologists, surgeons, nurses, and other specialists, to ensure a well-coordinated and comprehensive care for the patient. The ultimate aim is to enhance the patient's overall health, function, quality of life, and experience both during and after the surgical or invasive procedure.

Vision Statements for the Center for Perioperative Medicine

The vision for the Center for Perioperative Medicine is to optimize outcomes and experiences for our surgical patients, physician colleagues, nurses, allied health practitioners and administrators throughout the entire surgical journey by:

Ensuring all patients receive individualized, evidence-based care that is seamlessly coordinated among all members of the healthcare team, from preoperative evaluation and optimization, intraoperative management, postoperative recovery, discharge to home and follow-up care
Minimizing complications, improving functional recovery, and enhancing patient satisfaction through multidisciplinary collaboration, continuous quality improvement, and innovative research.
Transforming the perioperative period into a time of opportunity for changing lifestyle for better health, healing, growth, and empowerment for patients and their families.
Facilitating and supporting physician colleagues, healthcare practitioners and facility administrators in their journey towards creating value-based care pathways.

Mission Statement

To create widespread adoption of an interdisciplinary culture of collaboration and care coordination that advances the specialty of anesthesiology with the principles of Perioperative Medicine.

The Center for Perioperative Medicine will focus on the core principles of Quality, Operations, Education, Innovation and Advocacy. It serves as an umbrella organization that integrates various initiatives focused on perioperative medicine in both Anesthesiology and other related fields. Its goal is to facilitate the sharing of knowledge, experiences, and best practices to establish a unified approach to advance the field of Perioperative Medicine within and beyond the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA). The Center's scope encompasses clinical practice/value, education, research, and advocacy, among other areas.

The Center for Perioperative Medicine is prioritizing four tactics:

The EDUCATION WORKGROUP will create and curate enduring materials, valuable resources, and a curriculum for annual meeting focused on the tenets of perioperative medicine.

The ABA/ACGME WORKGROUP will work towards increasing the perioperative medicine content in the ABA accepted residency curriculum and an ACGME accepted fellowship curriculum.

The PERIOPERATIVE MEDICINE STAKEHOLDER WORKGROUP will provide opportunities for perioperative medicine stakeholders to learn and grow from one another while operationalizing efforts that amplify the goals of perioperative medicine.

The CORPORATE SUPPORTER STRATEGY WORKGROUP will develop a corporate supporter strategy to identify approaches to engage with industry.

Audience

The audience for the Center for Perioperative Medicine is varied. The value proposition is to provide excellent quality care, maximize efficiency at the lowest cost. All who can aid in this goal are potential audiences for the CPMed.

Primary Audience – The primary audiences for CPMed are anesthesiologists, patients, surgery and subspecialties as well as hospital executives.
Secondary Audiences – The secondary audiences for CPMed are hospitalists, nursing, patient advocacy groups, pharmacists, IT, rehab services, nutrition services, payors (private & public) and industry.

The audience for the Center for Perioperative Medicine is diverse. It is understood that there may be challenges with some of these identified audiences. It is the goal of the CPMed to identify opportunities for and promote collaboration. In addition, the specific audience for each CPMed tactic will vary, however, CPMed members will be able to refer to the CPMed foundational elements to ensure that each proposed tactic’s audience is aligned.