An opportunity to improve informed consent and shared decision making: The role of the ACS NSQIP surgical risk calculator in oncology

摘要

Cancer patients are being presented with a growing number of treatment options, many of which involve complex surgical decisions. The informed consent and shared decision-making process provides an increasingly important opportunity for surgeons to provide education, engage patients, make treatment recommendations and tailor perioperative care plans. Patient-specific assessments of operative risk are critical to these conversations. Unfortunately, relatively few resources have been available to help surgeons with these assessments. The American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP) has developed the ACS NSQIP Surgical Risk Calculator to provide patients and surgeons with predicted risks for 11 postoperative complications that are tailored to individual patient comorbidities. The tool was developed using data from over 1.4 million cases in ACS NSQIP and can be used for procedures in virtually every surgical subspecialty accounting for 2,500 CPT codes.