Upland Hills Health Achieves Certified Quality Breast Center Status

Upland Hills Health is proud to announce its designation as a Certified Quality Breast Center in the National Quality Measures for Breast Centers (NQMBC) program. The NQMBC program identifies quality care measures, monitors institutional outcomes for those measures, and provides immediate access to the data to allow participating breast centers, such as Upland Hills Health, to compare their performance with other centers across the United States.

For years, Upland Hills Health has been a member of the National Consortium of Breast Centers (NCBC), which established the NQMBC program, and it is through membership in the consortium that UHH has been able to participate in the NQMBC. This voluntary program tracks and measures quality performance metrics on more than 30 separate indicators. Through robust institutional participation, national quality benchmarks in breast care are established and allow for direct comparison of outcomes with breast centers of all sizes.

“We continually use this data to assess our performance and guide our improvement efforts. As a critical access rural breast center, Upland Hills Health is unique among participating breast centers because of our size and location,” according to Jared Linebarger, MD, a surgeon at Upland Hills Health. “Nevertheless, we are able to confirm through the NQMBC program that our breast cancer detection rates are comparable to screening detection rates at larger institutions in larger cities across the country. We see similar trends in treatment metrics, such as breast cancer surgery, as well.”

Dr. Linebarger completed a Fellowship with the Society of Surgical Oncology in Breast Surgical Oncology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He is one of a small handful of fellowship-trained breast cancer surgeons in Wisconsin. His fellowship-training means he can provide excellent breast cancer and breast disease care.

“Upland Hills Health and the community that supports it can be very proud of the investment they have made in breast health,” Dr. Linebarger said. “It demonstrates the importance that the health system and the community place on each individual and their personalized care, which are extremely important in breast cancer prevention, screening and treatment.”