Keck Medicine of USC’s Critical Care program was featured at the Society of Critical Care Medicine’s annual Congress on Sunday, January 25. The Society has just launched an ICU Center of Excellence designation for medical centers with exceptional critical care programs. Keck Medicine’s 7 East and 7 West surgical intensive care units were part of just three ICUs across the country that were chosen to be pilot locations for the program last year. As a part of the program, the USC Critical Care Institute helped to set standards for quality care in ICUs across the country as well as reporting standards to establish a national clinical quality registry.

Much of the ICU Center of Excellence Program centers on the use of ICU Liberation protocols. This bundle of best practices offers huge benefits for patients in ICUs, including mitigation of pain, less time on mechanical ventilators, increased mobility, less disruption of sleep, and a greatly reduced risk of delirium. The ICU Center of Excellence Program offers training and education for ICU teams as well as a path to continuous quality improvement through data reporting.

Perren Cobb, MD, Professor of Surgery and chief of the Surgical Critical Care Service Line and David Reynoso, MSN, RN, CCRN, Nurse Manager, delivered an invited address to the congress on Sunday afternoon. They discussed the successes of the ICU Centers of Excellence Demonstration Project at Keck Medicine, including a simulation with a hypothetical admitted patient. Cobb also emphasized the importance of establishing a national clinical quality database for intensive care to benchmark best practices.

Keck Medicine’s critical care program is no stranger to national accolades. As of February 2025, Keck Medicine of USC is the only hospital system in Southern California with an integrated critical care organization, the USC Critical Care Institute, dedicated to studying and improving multidisciplinary ICU care, and Keck Medicine has been a national leader in implementing ICU Liberation principles.

In 2024, Keck Hospital’s Surgical Intensive Care Unit received the Silver Beacon Award for Excellence from the American Association of Critical Care Nurses. “That’s several teams all working together in top form,” noted Cobb. “Critical care nurses, respiratory therapists, pharmacists, physical therapists—they should all be walking with their heads held high.”

As for the next step forward, Cobb has already submitted a grant proposal to the NIH to create the data science foundation for the national ICU clinical quality database. “This will be transformational,” he said. “We’re not just helping to improve care standards across the country. We’re laying a data science foundation for assessing and reporting quality of care. We’re mapping benchmark best practices to these new data standards.”

Cobb noted that national ICU quality registries have existed globally for over 30 years. Cobb believes that establishing such a database in the United States will be a crucial tool for potential patients and their families. “People will be able to make informed choices about where they get care,” he explained. “That’s good for the patients, and it pushes us all to keep getting better.”

— Lex Davis