Healthcare Matters

“Then the Philistines seized him, gouged out his eyes and took him down to Gaza. Binding him with bronze shackles, they set him to grinding grain in the prison.” Of course, it’s Samson of Samson & Delilah lore that is being referred to here, not an unlucky SCM professional charged with leading a change management initiative with a group of surgeons.

On June 4, the American College of Surgeons (ACS) hosted a Surgical Health Care Quality Forum at the Boston Marriott Copley Place to lead a discussion around Inspiring Quality in Surgical Health Care – Quality Improvement Programs that Improve Outcomes and Reduce Costs. Health care policy and clinical experts came together to discuss how quality surgical care not only delivers better patient outcomes, but also better financial outcomes, which is “a critical yet often overlooked component of surgical quality programs.” The keynote speaker was Stuart Altman, PhD, MA, BBA, Economist and Health Policy Expert, Brandeis University.

Known as a model for outcomes-based quality improvement, the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP®) collects clinical, risk-adjusted, 30-day outcomes data in a nationally benchmarked database. The program has been credited as “Best in the Nation” for surgical quality by the Institute of Medicine, and is currently utilized by approximately 400 hospitals across the U.S. A study published in the Annals of Surgery in 2009 determined that hospitals participating in ACS NSQIP prevented 250-500 complications, resulting in an average of 13-26 lives saved per hospital, per year. At $11,000 for an average cost of a complication, the combined potential savings of 4,500 hospitals could add up to $13-26 billion each year, amounting to an estimated total savings of $260 billion over a period of 10 years.

“Truly focusing on quality improvement requires good data – data that surgeons trust – and we have that with ACS NSQIP,” said panelist Matthew Hutter, MD, MPH, FACS; Director of the Codman Center for Clinical Effectiveness in Surgery, MGH; Harvard Medical School. “Administrative data isn’t good enough to drill down and help identify the cause of complications in order to prevent them from happening again. Clinically rich data – from a patient’s medical chart – benchmarked with other hospitals across the nation is what physicians, surgeons and hospitals need to drive change.”

—-

We just ran a piece announcing PremierConnect. Here’s how Susan DeVore, Premier’s president and CEO described the company’s new service: “Leaders will be able to easily make data-driven, evidence-based decisions that improve performance… providers will understand which physicians have the highest costs or the poorest performance and why these scenarios are occurring.”

The information being aggregated by PremierConnect will be updated every 30 days and will include the real time integration of EHRs from more than 325 hospitals. A physician or chief medical officer can monitor clinical performance, understand practice variation, access patient-level detail and support government reporting requirements. The information is clearly and simply presented and based on every diagnosis, procedure and patient visit. Continued DeVore, “and their providers will understand everything about their care — what drugs they’re taking or allergic to, what procedures they’ve had recently and more.”

Provider-level quality data derived from programs like ACS NSQIP –and now PremierConnect– have been proven to make a difference in helping hospitals create action plans to re-engineer workflows, foster and improve internal education, and develop clinical performance improvement initiatives. They facilitate the change management initiatives that SCM professionals are charged with managing –initiatives that are designed to drive standardization and eliminate variance in practice and supply utilization.

Whether you call them decision support tools or “virtual machines for change management” as I referred to PremierConnect’s new offering, these systems nail the intersection(s) of quality, safety and cost information. And despite the fact that physicians often balk at programs initiated by SCM professionals that drive standards to eliminate variance, that’s precisely what these systems do. They are all about facilitating change.

It would seem to make sense, however, especially in a market where tax payers pay the freight for almost half the services consumed, that groups like the ACS and entities like Premier could collaborate without fear of losing a competitive advantage. Regardless of how similar the services being independently developed by these two entities may be, there are close to 6,000 hospitals in the U.S. that shouldn’t be in the healthcare business without access to this kind of information.

Sources: American College of Surgeons, PR Newswire.

—Tom Finn