Patient data could be used to support revalidation, RCS says

Patients’ data could be used to support revalidation of doctors if statistically sound performance indicators could be developed, the Royal College of Surgeons of England has said.

The college has published a report, funded by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, which looked at the strengths and weaknesses of using administrative data to inform doctors’ revalidation.1 The report examined the use of routinely collected patient data on ischaemic heart disease, urological malignancies, and peripheral arterial disease.

It concluded that any indicator being considered for use in supporting revalidation must be capable of being linked to individual consultations.

The college found that hospital episode statistics (HES) on coronary artery bypass grafts by individual surgeons could be accurately linked to the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery’s database.

But the college said that it was unable to determine the extent to which consultants responsible for procedures in other clinical areas could be accurately identified in HES. The difficulty in establishing the nature and severity of a patient’s condition from HES data also limited the value of HES for revalidation, it said.

The report sets out a series of recommendations on the steps that need to be taken before performance indicators that are based on HES data should be used to inform revalidation assessments. Evaluating the suitability of the indicators for revalidation should include a look at their statistical power to detect divergent performance, the college said.