By Pete Mercer
A growing number of ambulatory surgery centers are embracing a new assessment that evaluates the systems, culture and leadership practices behind consistently safe, high-quality care.
The ASC Safety & Quality Assessment survey, designed to help ASC leadership check the success of their processes and protocols compared to other ASCs in the country, is in its second year after launching in 2025.
Repertoire Magazine spoke to Nina Goins, executive director of the ASC Quality Collaboration, about the ASC Safety & Quality Assessment survey and what it can tell us about the level of safety and quality within the ambulatory surgery space.
What is the ASCQC?
The ASC Quality Collaboration is an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing patient safety and quality of care in ASCs nationwide. Since its founding in 2006, ASCQC has played a leading role in developing standardized quality measures, promoting transparency and providing practical resources to help ASCs improve performance.
The organization developed six of the quality measures that CMS uses for its ASC Quality Reporting Program, a pay-for-reporting program that collects and publicly reports facility-level quality measure data from ASCs paid under the ASC Fee Schedule (ASCFS) for care provided in these settings. The ASCQC maintains one of the largest and longest-running ASC quality benchmarking databases in the country, which collects data from over 2,000 ASCs and over 2.5 million patient encounters each quarter, allowing centers to compare their performance against reliable national benchmarks and identify opportunities for improvement.
Goins said, “We work closely with industry leaders, quality professionals, and regulatory stakeholders to analyze trends, share best practices and develop practical resources such as assessments, toolkits, educational programs, and guidance documents that help ASCs strengthen safety and quality.”
Developing a quality assessment
The ASCQC developed the ASC Safety & Quality Assessment to help ASCs find practical ways to strengthen patient safety and quality of care. The assessment is a free benchmarking tool designed to specifically help ASC leaders evaluate the strength of their safety and quality practices and identify opportunities for improvement.
“While traditional quality benchmarking focuses on outcomes, this Assessment helps answer a different question. Instead of ‘How did we perform?’ it asks, ‘Do we have the practices in place that support consistently safe, high-quality care?’”
These are key benchmarks that any ASC should be measuring, like patient safety, infection prevention, quality improvement, patient experience, governance, and leadership engagement. After the 20-minute assessment is complete, each participating ASC receives a confidential dashboard report comparing its responses to national benchmarks.
Now in its second year, participation in the assessment continues to grow. In 2025, nearly 400 ASCs participated in the inaugural assessment. This year, more than 700 ASCs participated. Goins said, “Our hope is that centers use the results to facilitate meaningful conversations with their teams, celebrate areas of strength and prioritize opportunities for improvement.”
She said, “The response we received to the first year of the assessment validated its value. In addition, it was important to continue into a second year because the real value of any assessment comes from measuring progress over time. The growth in responses to this year’s assessment suggests the industry sees value in having an ASC-specific assessment focused on learning and improvement.”
Bridging the gap, embracing change
From the start, Goins and her team have never been trying to point out deficiencies within the industry. They recognized that ASCs are highly efficient organizations, and they knew that they would need an assessment that respected that efficiency, while still providing meaningful insights.
Instead, they saw the opportunity to provide a structured way for organizations to evaluate and benchmark the safety and quality practices that support excellent outcomes. They designed the assessment to help participating ASCs to better understand areas like foundational systems, processes, culture and governance structures that contribute to safe care, and compare those areas with national benchmarks.
The industry has gone through some significant changes in recent years, specifically in the increased complexity of procedures performed by ASCs and further efforts to improve patient safety. As the conversation about patient safety and transparency continues to evolve, Goins has a unique perspective on the change from compliance focused reporting to using data as a tool for improvement.
“Today, more ASC leaders are actively benchmarking performance, evaluating safety practices, assessing culture, and looking for opportunities to learn from both adverse events and near misses,” she said. “I’ve seen greater openness in discussing challenges and organizations are becoming more comfortable sharing their data, identifying gaps and focusing on improvement rather than judgement. That transparency helps create stronger safety cultures and ultimately better outcomes for patients.”
Areas of opportunity
Despite the challenges healthcare faces in 2026, Goins said she is optimistic about the level of participation that they’ve seen in the last two assessments the ASCQC has conducted.
“The high level of participation itself is a quality signal. The ASCs choosing to complete this assessment are proactively seeking information about how they are performing. That reflects a culture of safety and quality within the industry – the strong, consistent scores from the assessment provide data to back that up.”
The biggest surprise that they found in the results of the assessment is that many centers are not routinely measuring safety culture. Nearly all the centers that completed the assessment had foundational safety systems in place; only one-third of them did not consistently conduct a culture of patient safety survey.
She said, “Culture surveys are very valuable in that they capture what may be happening beneath the surface, such as staff comfort speaking up and how common workarounds are. Findings in culture of safety surveys can highlight risks that ASC leaders need to understand.”
Measuring success for the future
For Goins, success is not just the level of participation, but also seeing organizations use the results to highlight their commitment to safe, high-quality care.
Going forward, she hopes that the ASC Safety & Quality Assessment is viewed as an eagerly awaited resource that helps ASCs evaluate their safety and quality practices, while also identifying opportunities for improvement and demonstrating commitment to safety for everyone involved.
AI and analytics have high potential to help leaders uncover patterns that may not be obvious through traditional reporting, but she believes that they won’t replace the essentials of an ASC.
“While technology will never replace clinical judgement or a strong culture of safety, it continues to evolve, and ASCs can look forward to better tools to identify risk, prioritize improvement efforts, and make more informed decisions. The goal remains the same – safer care and better outcomes for patients.”
Key Takeaways
- Quality starts before outcomes
The ASC Safety & Quality Assessment shifts the focus from simply measuring results to evaluating whether the right systems, processes and culture are in place to consistently deliver safe, high-quality patient care. - Safety culture remains a major opportunity
While most ASCs have strong foundational safety programs, only about one-third consistently conduct patient safety culture surveys, a missed opportunity to identify communication gaps, staff concerns and hidden risks before they affect patients. - Benchmarking is driving continuous improvement
Participation in the free assessment nearly doubled – from almost 400 ASCs in 2025 to more than 700 in 2026 – reflecting the industry’s growing commitment to using data, transparency and benchmarking to strengthen patient safety rather than simply meet compliance requirements.