Artificial Intelligence in Surgical Quality Improvement

This article examines the evolution of health care quality improvement (QI) and the emerging role of artificial intelligence (AI), with particular emphasis on cardiothoracic surgery. Historically, QI frameworks have progressed from structural expansion and regulatory oversight to outcome-oriented models, notably shaped by Donabedian's structure-process-outcome paradigm and the Institute of Medicine's 6 quality domains. Despite advancements, traditional QI efforts remain constrained by limitations in measurement, reliance on surrogate metrics, and labor-intensive data processes. AI offers transformative potential by enabling large-scale extraction and analysis of structured and unstructured clinical data, facilitating real-time, continuous quality assessment.