Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a good time to review quality improvement initiatives that your facility has undertaken in the past year and to plan for future initiatives. The National Mammography Database (NMD) can serve as a significant resource for this effort. During the past several years, the NMD has continued to expand opportunities to identify how improvements to mammography programs and individual physician performance can enhance patient care.
For instance, have you recently reviewed the interactive to see how your facility’s performance compares to peers for two new “timeliness” measures? These measures show peer comparisons for the timeliness in recommending additional imaging and biopsies within a specified number of days. Viewing your performance compared to peers could help you target areas for improvement.
Another new feature of the NMD Measures — Aggregate Report is the BI-RADS® Benchmarking tab that displays how a facility's rate compares to the BI-RADS benchmark for registry measures: recall rate, positive predictive value 1, positive predictive value 2 and cancer detection rate. This new feature highlights when facility rates fall above or below benchmark values and can be a helpful aid for targeting areas for improvement.
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Not yet participating in the NMD?
Learn how to get started by viewing the NMD Webinar Training Series. Coming soon: Watch the NMD webpage for the NMD Start-Up Guide.