Chart review after EVAR demonstrated a 6% 1-year and 16% 3-year reintervention rate, and almost all (92%) of these events were accurately captured using VQI-Medicare data. Linking VQI data with Medicare claims allows an accurate assessment of reintervention rates after EVAR without labor-intensive physician chart review.

Objective Accurate and complete long-term post-operative outcome data is critical to improving value in healthcare delivery. The Society for Vascular Surgery – Vascular Quality Initiative (VQI) is an important tool to achieve this goal in vascular surgery. To improve on the capture of long term outcomes after vascular surgery procedures for patients in the VQI, we sought to match VQI data to Medicare Claims for comprehensive capture of major clinical outcomes in the first several years following vascular procedures. Methods Patient and procedure characteristics for abdominal aortic aneurysm procedures captured in the SVS-VQI between January 1, 2002, and December 31, 2013 were matched to Medicare claims data using an indirect identifier methodology. Late outcomes captured in the VQI and in Medicare claims were compared. Results Matching procedures yielded 9,895 endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) patients (82.4% of eligible VQI patients) and 3,405 open aneurysm repair (OAR) patients (74.4% of eligible). Comparison of patients that did and did-not match to a Medicare claim demonstrated similar patient and procedure characteristics. Evaluation of late outcomes revealed good patient-level agreement on mortality for both EVAR (kappa 0.64) and OAR (kappa 0.82). Post-operative reintervention rates demonstrated lower agreement for both EVAR (kappa 0.26) and OAR (kappa 0.16). Conclusions This work demonstrates the feasibility of an algorithm using indirect identifiers to match VQI patients and procedures to Medicare claims data. The refinement of this strategy will focus on establishing and improving algorithms related to identifying and categorizing late events after EVAR, and may serve as a mechanism to ensure the best quality follow-up information is achieved within the Vascular Quality Initiative.

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