The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has announced a new initiative to track hospital admissions among Medicare patients who have recently been served at an ambulatory surgical center.  The new measure would become part of the agency’s broader quality reporting efforts.

The federal government has a large stake in the performance of ambulatory surgical centers:  it spends $4 billion a year on care for more than three million Medicare patients at such facilities.

Learn more about the project CMS calls “Development of a Facility-Level Quality Measure of Unplanned Hospital Visits after General Surgery Procedures Performed at Ambulatory Surgical Centers” and what the agency has proposed here, on CMS’s quality measures public comment page.