The Michigan Society of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeons Quality Collaborative European Fellowship Program

The Michigan Society of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeons Quality Collaborative, or MSTCVS-QC, is a multidisciplinary group embedded in the Michigan Society of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeons. This professional society founded in 1965 is dedicated to advancing the value and improving the care of cardiac and thoracic surgery patients in Michigan. The collaborative has recently had the unique opportunity to advance Cardiac and Thoracic Surgery quality improvement methodologies not only in Michigan but now with European colleagues.

The MSTCVS Quality Collaborative, created in 2001, promotes and shares optimal processes of care and cardiac and thoracic surgical outcomes. It implements quality improvement initiatives based on regional and national data, clinical outcomes studies, and evidence-based cardiac and thoracic surgery practice guidelines. All 32 adult cardiac surgical programs in Michigan participate in the collaborative; it’s considered a paradigm of a physician-led quality collaborative for process and outcome improvement in cardiac surgery in the country.

With worldwide recognition as a premier physician-led quality improvement group, the collaborative has hosted three cardiac surgical fellows from the European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery. The Fontan Foundation of the European Association funds this fellowship. The fellows spent four months in Ann Arbor learning MSTCVS-QC approaches and methodologies for quality improvement. These trainees and early career faculty from Europe returned to their home institutions with the tools to collect, analyze and parse these data and then utilize it to initiate quality improvement initiatives at their institutions as well as regionally. A fourth Fellow has been selected and will arrive early fall 2022.

The fellows:

• Milan Milojevic, M.D., M.S.  He returned to complete his Ph.D. at Erasmus University in the Netherlands and is now with Clinical Epidemiology at Dedinje Cardiovascular Institute in Belgrade, Serbia and Erasmus University. He also serves as the chair of the Clinical Practice Guideline Committee at EACTS. 

• Chris Bond, M.B. Ch.B., led portions of the 2019 annual summer conference discussions related to statewide treatment patterns for atrial fibrillation, failure to rescue, and an update on the phase of care mortality analysis results from Michigan. He presented a leading paper at the 2020 Society of Thoracic Surgeons meeting, the largest Cardiac and Thoracic Surgical Society in the world, citing techniques and results of the MSTCVS-QC approach to increasing multi-arterial grafting in patients. He completed his senior registrar year at Birmingham, UK, at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital.

• Dimitrios Magouliotis from Larissa, Greece who is a cardiothoracic resident at the University of Thessaly, Larissa, Greece, and is currently finishing his first month with the MSTCVS-QC collaborative.

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