Surgery Peer Review

Surgery Peer Review

The American Medical Foundation (AMF) was created in 1987 by leaders of medical societies and health care organizations to implement the Health Care Quality Improvement Act.

Our Founder in Surgery, Dr. Claude Welch, was President of the American College of Surgeons.  Since that time, 13 other Presidents of the College have served on our Board of Directors or Advisory Committee to lead AMF in its purpose to create an opportunity for surgeons to obtain a fair peer review and to provide remedial education should that be required.

Impartial AMF experts have reviewed every sub specialty of surgery for thousands of hospitals over 35 years. They identify issues where surgical care was judged controversial or inappropriate and, when present, system issues which impact adversely on patient care.  In particular, they have identified the reasons for high complication rates, reoperations and readmissions.

The Foundation provides specialized review services when an evaluation is needed for a hospital’s overall quality of surgical care and peer review. This includes a review of the structure and performance of the department’s quality review system, the actual quality of clinical care, and any litigation history. Our team of experts, representing various surgical specialties, identifies problems in quality assurance, peer review and clinical care. They look at the process used by all divisions of the department, the means by which they operate report and interact, and the way each practitioner is evaluated. The team looks at all methods of quality assurance, interdepartmental communications and Quality Review methodology. Indicators of variances and morbidity and mortality data by both department and individual practitioners are examined. Recommendations are then made, for example, on improving communication between departments, monitoring quality, clinical standards, performance improvement, staff coverage policies and more effective screening within the department and throughout the hospital.

We Recommend ACS NSQIP

We recommend NSQIP from the American College of Surgeons.  Hospitals utilizing NSQIP have determined an improvement of care for their surgical patients.  Call us and we can assist you in achieving a surgical quality improvement program so effective that each year it will prevent hundreds of complications and dozens of lives while reducing millions of dollars of costs.

Please let us know if we can be of assistance to you. Click here to contact us.

Specialty Department Review