Are surgical patients at risk of venous thromboembolism currently meeting the Surgical Care Improvement Project performance measure for appropriate and timely prophylaxis?

The US Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP) has approved two performance measures to improve venous thromboembolism (VTE) prevention. SCIP-VTE-2 measures the proportion of surgery patients who received appropriate VTE prophylaxis within 24 h prior to surgery to 24 h after surgery. This study assesses the current rate of achievement of SCIP-VTE-2 criteria using a retrospective data set of real-world surgical patients. The Premier Perspective database, which contains real-world data from >400 US hospitals, was queried (January 2004-December 2006) for in-patient hospital transactional billing records of surgical patients aged >or=18 years. The primary outcome was the proportion of patients achieving SCIP-VTE-2 requirements for appropriate and timely prophylaxis as per the SCIP-VTE-2 algorithm. Of the 149,785 patients included, 56.2% received appropriate prophylaxis and 52.7% achieved the SCIP-VTE-2 performance measure for both appropriate and timely prophylaxis. To conclude, this study highlights that VTE prophylaxis currently only meets SCIP-VTE-2 requirements in approximately half of real-world surgical patients. The use of retrospective analyses such as this hospital billing data analysis may assist hospitals in measuring their current and future performance in VTE prevention.