The US Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP) has approved two performance measures to improve venous thromboembolism (VTE) prevention. SCIP-VTE-2 measures the proportion of surgery patients who received appropriate VTE prophylaxis within 24 h prior to surgery to 24 h after surgery. This study assesses the current rate of achievement of SCIP-VTE-2 criteria using a retrospective data set of real-world surgical patients. The Premier Perspective database, which contains real-world data from >400 US hospitals, was queried (January 2004-December 2006) for in-patient hospital transactional billing records of surgical patients aged >or=18 years. The primary outcome was the proportion of patients achieving SCIP-VTE-2 requirements for appropriate and timely prophylaxis as per the SCIP-VTE-2 algorithm. Of the 149,785 patients included, 56.2% received appropriate prophylaxis and 52.7% achieved the SCIP-VTE-2 performance measure for both appropriate and timely prophylaxis. To conclude, this study highlights that VTE prophylaxis currently only meets SCIP-VTE-2 requirements in approximately half of real-world surgical patients. The use of retrospective analyses such as this hospital billing data analysis may assist hospitals in measuring their current and future performance in VTE prevention.