Society of Interventional Radiology clinical practice guidelines.

A primary goal of the Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) is ensuring high quality outcomes and patient safety in vascular and interventional radiology. For more than a decade, SIR, through its Standards Division, has taken a leadership role in improving health care quality through the development of evidence-based standards and clinical practice guidelines for the successful performance of minimally invasive catheter-based interventional radiologic procedures. This supplement serves as a compilation of the Division’s published work to date. The Standards Division has primarily focused on two linked processes: developing a quality improvement program with clinical practice guidelines and developing reporting standards for interventional techniques and devices to ensure that devices used in the practice of interventional radiology are applied safely and appropriately to patients and that patients have timely access to important new technological advances. In addition, the Division has written and contributed to credentialing standards to ensure that practitioners are appropriately trained to perform diagnostic and interventional procedures. The SIR Standards of Practice Committee is responsible for the first process, developing the Society’s quality improvement guidelines for clinical practice. These documents contain the core of the SIR Quality Improvement Process, a set of indicator thresholds. The indicators for outcomes are effectiveness (success), indications, and complication rates. Interventional radiology practices use these indicator thresholds to examine their outcomes on a regular basis and are encouraged to do so at monthly Quality Assurance meetings. The second major process is the generation of reporting standards, which are developed by the SIR Technology Assessment Committee. These documents serve as important guidelines for industry and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the evaluation of new devices during premarket trials and development. For example, the Society has published a template for evaluation of new endovascular devices. This template is used by industry to design standardized, streamlined protocols (1). SIR Reporting Standards also serve to promote uniform and improved data analysis in the literature. Broad use of these documents improves the ability to compare and assess devices and techniques from article to article. Lack of standardized data analysis has previously been a major problem with the published literature. The SIR quality improvement and standards program was launched in 1988 with the development of “Guidelines for Establishing a Quality Improvement Program in Vascular and Interventional Radiology.” Since that time 20 Quality Improvement Guidelines, 11 Reporting Standards, 4 position statements, and several credentialing criteria have been generated. In addition, the SIR Standards Division has been actively involved in generating international consensus guidelines and multi-society consensus documents, usually providing the only major interventional radiology perspective on vascular medicine.