All of you are familiar with some of the regulatory requirements that affect your practice, as identified by their acronyms and initials: HIPAA, CMS, CoPs,PQRS, SCIP, ACO, HCAHPS. For hospital-based practices, there are now two additional “ingredients” in our regulatory alphabet soup that will require your attention: OPPE and FPPE. Historically, hospital medical staff appointments and reappointments have been primarily a subjective process, where the clinical chief signed off on credential/privilege requests, perceived competencies and specific skills. The Joint Commission and other accrediting bodies and payers have established more stringent guidelines for the ongoing evaluation of medical staff members. The Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation (OPPE) and Focused Professional Practice Evaluation (FPPE) are now becoming part of every hospitalbased anesthesia practice’s routine. These evaluations are expected to occur on a regular basis and serve as the key component to the hospital reappointment process. Key Components  In adopting the Accreditation Council for Graduate...

The Anesthesia Quality Institute (AQI) was founded in 2009 to promote patient safety and quality management efforts across the specialty. The primary mission of the AQI is development of the National Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes Registry (NACOR), a repository for anesthesia case-specific data from across the country. NACOR is populated by transmission of electronic information from participating anesthesia practices and hospitals, including administrative (billing) data, Anesthesia Information Management System (AIMS) data, elements from the hospital’s electronic healthcare records, and purpose- gathered patient outcome information. The AQI began recruiting practices a year ago, and began accepting case data fromJanuary 1, 2010. To date, the AQI has contracts with more than 40 anesthesia practices (including several ABC clients) and is working with more than a dozen anesthesia software vendors to format, transmit and translate their data into NACOR. Although few AQI sites have all of the desired data in electronic form today, all are...