Pusic receives $1.5M grant from Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospital surgeon and Brigham Health’s Chief of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Andrea Pusic, MD, MHS, FACS, FRCSC, was awarded a $1.5 million R18 grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) for her project, “Scaling and Spreading Electronic Capture of Patient-Reported Outcomes Using a National Surgical Quality Improvement Program.”

R18 grants support research aimed at identifying and evaluating the application of evidence-based practices in ambulatory care and long-term care to improve patient safety.

This multi-institutional project aims to scale and spread the routine, health IT-enabled collection of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) from ambulatory surgical patients using a well-established, national surgical quality improvement registry program. Results of this research will accelerate the uptake of using PROs for quality improvement across the U.S., identify best practices for implementation of such a program and explore whether PROs can reliably identify quality improvement opportunities.

Pusic will serve as co-principal investigator on the project with Clifford Y. Ko, MD, of the American College of Surgeons, and Larissa Temple, MD, of the University of Rochester Medical Center.

An agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, AHRQ works to produce evidence to make health care safer, higher quality, more accessible, equitable and affordable for all Americans.