ABOUT US

The vision of the AQI is to become the primary source of information for quality improvement in the clinical practice of anesthesiology.

The mission of the AQI is to develop and maintain an ongoing registry of case data that helps anesthesiologists assess and improve patient care. Organize the registry so that anesthesiology practice groups desire to submit their case information, and so that individual anesthesiologists, practice groups, researchers, and professional societies find the data useful for improving the quality of care.

Established by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, the AQI represents the next step in the specialty’s quality improvement mission. Although operating as a separate 501(c)(3) entity, AQI’s work will complement and enhance the efforts of ASA and other organizations such as the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation, the Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research, the ASA Closed Claims Project, the National Surgical Quality Improvement Project and the Surgical Quality Alliance.

Anesthesia Quality Institute (AQI) Policies

1. AQI does not collect data that directly identifies a patient, provider or facility.
2. AQI does not report on or publish any data about an individual patient, provider or facility to any entity except the AQI participating practice that submitted the data.
3. AQI will consider individual requests for customized reports and/or data based on available resources.  Requests should be submitted to the Data Use Committee at askaqi@asahq.org.
4. AQI is a non-profit charity organization, and as such, we do not pay indirect costs for outside services that we contract for. Indirect costs are defined as expenses that benefit common activities such as utilities; existing IT equipment, maintenance and depreciation; insurance; administrative supplies and support; and other shared resources not directly attributable to a project.
5. For purposes of funding research, AQI caps physician salaries according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) salary cap.

The AQI supports the following four registries:

NACOR
The National Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes Registry (NACOR) has gathered data on millions of cases, thousands of facilities, and tens of thousands of providers. This number is growing every day as new practices submit data and existing practices contribute their monthly cases. Registry participants range from practices who record on paper documents to the most wired academic centers in the country. You do not need an AIMS system or Electronic Health Records to participate in AQI. NACOR is collecting the following types of data: Billing/Administrative, Quality/Perioperative Events, AIMS data and Electronic Medical Records.

AIRS
The Anesthesia Incident Reporting System (AIRS) is a national collection of serious adverse events and near misses, collected confidentially. Any anesthesia provider can contribute to AIRS; AQI participation is not required.  Report events by accessing the website at www.aqiairs.org. De-identified cases from AIRS provide teaching material for case reports featured in the ASA Newsletter.

MOCA-PPAI
The Maintenance of Certification in Anesthesiology (MOCA) Practice Performance Assessment and Improvement (PPAI) registry is a joint effort of ASA and the AQI. Participants in MOCA are required to assess the quality of their practice – including clinical data from real patients. ASA modules provide an easy-to-use format for doing this. The AQI registry will collect and protect the clinical data entered by MOCA participants. The AQI will go a step further for anesthesiologists in practices that participate in NACOR. We will soon be piloting a voluntary program that helps providers identify the cases they need to collect for their MOCA-PPAI project. For the long term, this system will auto-populate much of the required data. 

NPR
The National Pain Registry helps anesthesiologists keep track of long-term pain management outcomes. Working with experts from the American Society for Regional Anesthesia and Pain Management (ASRA), we have laid out a template for data and definitions. We will help participants build these measures into existing EHRs such that the data can be periodically transferred to the AQI.

AQI is listed as a Patient Safety Organization (PSO) by the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), is a member of the National Quality Forum (NQF) and Multicenter Perioperative Outcomes Group (MPOG).