Mount Sinai Hospital’s Cancer Care Center has been recognized by the Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI®) Certification Program, an affiliate of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). The QOPI® Certification Program provides a three-year certification for outpatient hematology-oncology practices that meet the highest standards for quality cancer care.

QOPI® is a voluntary, self-assessment and improvement program launched by ASCO in 2006 to help hematology-oncology and medical oncology practices assess the quality of the care they provide to patients. Through the QOPI program, practices abstract data from patients’ records up to twice per year and enter this information into a secure database. More than 850 oncology practices have registered in the QOPI program.

The QOPI® Certification Program (QCP™) was launched in January 2010, with more than 200 practices already certified. To become certified, practices have to submit to an evaluation of their entire practice and documentation standards. The QCP staff and steering group members then verify through on-site inspection that the evaluation and documents are correct and that the practices met core standards in areas of treatment, including:

• treatment planning;
• staff training and education;
• chemotherapy orders and drug preparation;
• patient consent and education;
• safe chemotherapy administration;
• monitoring and assessment of patient well-being.

The QOPI Certification Program is a project of ASCO’s Institute for Quality, an ASCO affiliate dedicated to innovative quality improvement programs. For more information, please visit: http://qopi.asco.org/certification.html.