Participate in Research at CU Anschutz

The purpose of this protocol is to enable the creation of a Perioperative Informatics of Colorado (PICO) database that allows the evaluation of various aspects of care provided by members of the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Colorado School (CU-DOA) and their association with perioperative outcomes or hospital resource utilization. Perioperative data for the PICO database will be collected from the electronic medical record (EMR) retrospectively, or prospectively using validated patient-reported outcomes, including the NIH-developed patient-reported outcomes measurements information system (PROMISTM) or Quality of Recovery (QoR) (e.g., QoR-15) questionnaires1,2. This protocol will be used for Quality Improvement (QI) or research questions. The overall hypothesis is that the Department of Anesthesiology database will identify specific care practices associated with improved perioperative outcomes. Specific hypotheses for individual projects will depend on the aspect of care to be analyzed, and they can include certain medications or analgesia strategies provided by anesthesiology members, intraoperative depths of sedation, hemodynamic or ventilatory approaches, or usual care interventions during the preoperative clinic visits or postoperative care.

The development of this database will allow us to study various aspects of care provided by members of the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine (CU-DOA) and their association with perioperative outcomes or hospital resource utilization. The information provided will allow us to improve the anesthesia care we provide to our patients, their satisfaction and their clinical outcomes.