Maintaining the Quality in Venous Care

Over the course of the last few years, the world of venous care has evolved at a staggering pace. There are more phlebology practices now than ever before, and unfortunately there is significant variance in the quality of vein care provided by the various practitioners. This may be due to the great variability of training or the broad range of treatment modalities. For this reason, it is more important than ever to examine each practice’s quality related processes and outcomes.

As every field in medicine gets analyzed more closely for over utilization, effectiveness, and patient outcomes, the field of phlebology will also be in the cross hairs.1It is important that everyone who practices venous insufficiency treatment takes on the responsibility of providing the best care available. This can be achieved by establishing medical protocols, continuous evaluation and grading of providers, clinical audits on complication rates, regular reviews of evidence-based treatment plans, and compliance reports.

Venous Care

Evidence-based treatment protocols ensure the most appropriate patient care and are becoming more and more important in every medical field. Because of the wide variation in treatment options in phlebology, medical protocols are necessary. They are a set of predetermined criteria that defines appropriate interventions that articulate or describe situations in which the provider makes judgments relative to a course of action for effective management of the venous patient. The daily use of protocols has proven to yield better results than in practices that do not utilize them2

Regular evaluation and grading of providers using a “score card system”, which includes criteria such as post-procedure venous closure rates, improvement in Venous Clinical Severity Score (VCSS), as well as physician evaluation skills should be included as part of a continuous evaluation of all providers. This ensures that the quality of care is at or above national standards. This “score care system” also gives providers and practices a chance to objectively improve on the quality of care, thus always advancing the field.