Successful surgical benchmarking program moves to private sector.

In the late 1980s, Congress passed a law requiring all Veterans' Administration hospitals to report surgical outcomes annually on a risk-adjusted basis and compare them to national averages in the private sector. However, those national averages did not exist. Fifteen years later, efforts to remedy that oversight have led to the creation of the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program and dramatic successes in both patient care and cost management.