LeMaistre, Charles F., Wacker, Kara K., Akard, Luke P., Al-Homsi, A. Samer, Gastineau, Dennis A., Godder, Kamar, Lill, Michael, Selby, George B., Steinberg, Amir, Anderson, Judy M., Leahigh, Alan K., and Warkentin, Phyllis I.
• The Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy (FACT) requires accredited programs to assess patient outcomes, which should meet expected ranges. • Continued 1-year survival that is lower than expected can affect FACT accreditation. • Programs that do not meet expected survival must implement corrective actions. • FACT provides assurance that programs review and improve patient outcomes. The rapid evolution of blood and marrow transplantation (BMT), coupled with diverse outcomes associated with heterogeneous groups of patients, led to the formation of 2 important organizations early in the development of the field: the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR) and the Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy (FACT). These organizations have addressed 2 of the 9 elements identified by the National Quality Strategy (NQS) for achieving better health care, more affordable care, and healthy people and communities: a registry that promotes improvement of care and accreditation based on quality standards. More recently, a federally mandated database in the United States addresses the third element of the NQS: public reporting of treatment results. Here we describe the current process by which FACT incorporates patient outcomes reported by the CIBMTR into standards for accreditation, the requirements for accredited programs with performance below expected outcomes to maintain accreditation, and preliminary findings of an assessment of corrective action plans intended to improve outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]