Society of Interventional Radiology Clinical Practice Guidelines

Abstract

A primary goal of the Society of Inter-ventional Radiology (SIR) is ensuringhigh quality outcomes and patientsafety in vascular and interventionalradiology. For more than a decade,SIR, through its Standards Division,has taken a leadership role in improv-ing health care quality through the de-velopment of evidence-based stan-dards and clinical practice guidelinesfor the successful performance of min-imally invasive catheter-based inter-ventional radiologic procedures. Thissupplement serves as a compilation ofthe Division’s published work to date.The Standards Division has primar-ily focused on two linked processes:developing a quality improvementprogram with clinical practice guide-lines and developing reporting stan-dards for interventional techniquesand devices to ensure that devicesused in the practice of interventionalradiology are applied safely and ap-propriately to patients and that pa-tients have timely access to importantnew technological advances. In addi-tion, the Division has written and con-tributed to credentialing standards toensure that practitioners are appropri-ately trained to perform diagnosticand interventional procedures.The SIR Standards of Practice Com-mittee is responsible for the first pro-cess, developing the Society’s qualityimprovement guidelines for clinicalpractice. These documents contain thecore of the SIR Quality ImprovementProcess, a set of indicator thresholds.The indicators for outcomes are effec-tiveness (success), indications, andcomplication rates. Interventional ra-diology practices use these indicatorthresholds to examine their outcomeson a regular basis and are encouragedto do so at monthly Quality Assurancemeetings.The second major process is thegeneration of reporting standards,which are developed by the SIR Tech-nology Assessment Committee. Thesedocuments serve as important guide-lines for industry and the U.S. Foodand Drug Administration (FDA) in theevaluation of new devices during pre-market trials and development. Forexample, the Society has published atemplate for evaluation of new endo-vascular devices. This template is usedby industry to design standardized,streamlined protocols (1). SIR Report-ing Standards also serve to promoteuniform and improved data analysisin the literature. Broad use of thesedocuments improves the ability tocompare and assess devices and tech-niques from article to article. Lack ofstandardized data analysis has previ-ously been a major problem with thepublished literature.The SIR quality improvement andstandards program was launched in1988 with the development of “