About Us

SCOAP is a surgical quality improvement program that engages a community of healthcare professionals to improve the care and outcomes of surgical patients by:

Defining appropriate quality measures for care processes and outcomes
Generating surveillance data that shows how well the care is being performed
Analyzing and studying the data to see where the care needs to be improved
Sharing with each other the best practices for improving care; thereby reducing variability and errors
Tracking progress over time

The healthcare professionals from the hospitals that voluntarily participate in this program are dedicated to the achievement of excellence in surgical care as their overall goal is to create a safe and enhanced experience for patients undergoing surgery while at the same time reducing costs-costs to the individual patient as well as to society at large.

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Clinicians	Data/QI Professionals	Public

Under the MicroSCOAP

Governor Christine Gregoire champions better healthcare through her support of SCOAP

SCOAP’s 1st Annual Meeting was held on June 15th, 2008. Governor Christine Gregoire opened the meeting with a video greeting in which she acknowledged the innovative patient safety approach being taken by SCOAP participating hospitals. Governor Gregoire expressed her hope that SCOAP would soon be in all hospitals across Washington State so that all citizens would have equal access to appropriate and quality care.

The Annual Meeting was designed to highlight the collaborative approach taken by SCOAP with most of the day taken up by work groups discussing ways to move SCOAP to the next level and “Scoap out the future together”.

The resulting discussions illustrated how SCOAP has energized the participating healthcare professionals and engaged the surgeons in the QI process. One of the senior data abstractors described a scene where “for the first time in 16 years, a surgeon came into my office to ask to see his charts to better understand his SCOAP performance and how to improve”!

SCOAP was the largest grantee of the Governor’s Life Sciences Discovery Fund which was set up to promote innovative life sciences research, receiving $1.3 million in funding awarded in January 2008. This grant will be used to expand the scope of SCOAP so that all citizens in Washington State can receive safer, more effective and less costly surgical care.

The Scope of SCOAP

At the American College of Surgery (ACS) Meeting held in June 2007 an ambitious goal was set for SCOAP to increase recruitment from the 18 hospitals that were in SCOAP at the time to 30 hospitals by the next ACS meeting in June 2008. SCOAP met this goal and now has 30 hospitals participating in the program.

SCOAP engages in Active Change

SCOAP is now active in the implementation of safety procedures in the OR through a SCOAP Safer Surgery OR Safety Checklist. A coalition to support this initiative has been formed and the kickoff meeting was held May 30th at The Foundation for Health Care Quality. The coalition members set the goal of getting a SCOAP checklist into every OR in Washington State by the end of 2009. This initiative has already received media attention along with the related WHO checklist launch on June 25th.

World Health Organization (WHO) Launch of Safe Surgery Saves Lives Global Initiative Coincides with SCOAP Research

Data

A Data Committee has been formed to revise and refine the data dictionary for enhanced efficiency and integrity of data collection. The Committee is composed of data abstractors, the program director and the Chair of the SCOAP Management Committee.

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