Greater Baltimore Medical Center’s Comprehensive Obesity Management Program (COMP) recently received an earned certification for weight loss surgery under the Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Accreditation and Quality Improvement Program (MBSAQIP) which sets standards for safe, high-quality bariatric patient care.

To earn the MBSAQIP designation, GBMC’s COMP program met essential criteria for staffing, training and facility infrastructure and protocols for care, ensuring its ability to support patients with severe obesity.  Currently, there are more than 700 centers in the country now hold this accreditation.

“This is a great accomplishment and shows the staff’s dedication to the highest quality care for each of our patients,” said Elizabeth Dovec, M.D., bariatric surgeon and medical director of GBMC’s COMP program.  “This accreditation should help future patients understand that our comprehensive program caters to the individualized needs of bariatric patients and ensures that their needs are met before, during and after surgery.”

According to the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS), an estimated 179,000 people underwent gastric bypass, gastric banding, and other bariatric operations in 2013 versus 158,000 two years earlier. 

Research, published in the recent edition of the Journal of The American College of Surgeons, found that patients who have weight-loss operations at non-accredited bariatric surgical facilities in the U.S. are up to 1.4 times likelier to experience serious complications and more than twice as likely to die after the operation compared with patients who undergo these procedures at accredited bariatric surgical centers.  Authors of the study also concluded that there are lower costs at accredited bariatric surgical centers compared with non-accredited centers.

MBSAQIP is a joint program of the American College of Surgeons(ACS) and ASMBS.  Centers seeking MBSAQIP accreditation must undergo an extensive site visit by an experienced bariatric surgeon, who reviews the center's structure, process, and clinical outcomes data.

An estimated 15.5 million Americans suffer from severe obesity, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the numbers are expected to increase.