Hospitals participating in a Premier healthcare alliance quality improvement program have saved more than $284 million over the past year through improvements in clinical performance and enhancements in professional practice evaluation.
“Now it is more exciting because we can see core measures and outcomes by individual physicians rather than just hospital-wide results. This makes a bigger impact with our physicians.”
As a result of healthcare reform, hospitals nationwide will face $147 billion in market basket cuts during the next decade unless they make significant changes. Legislation will increasingly tie payment to performance; therefore, the ability to improve quality and prevent harm, such as readmissions and hospital-acquired conditions (HACs), is essential.
Premier's QualityConnect™ integrates quality and safety data to help hospitals make better decisions about harm prevention, including how to reduce HACs. It also supports The Joint Commission Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation (OPPE) requirements.
Knapp Medical Center of Weslaco, Texas, attributes $2.8 million in savings in one year of using QualityAdvisor™, a solution in QualityConnect, and its practitioner profile. The hospital also reduced readmissions to cut patient length of stay by 98 days, prevented 27 deaths and avoided complications in 28 cases.
"I wouldn't want to return to our old way of doing things before QualityAdvisor," said Ginger Robles, RN, director of Quality Management at Knapp. "Now it is more exciting because we can see core measures and outcomes by individual physicians rather than just hospital-wide results. This makes a bigger impact with our physicians."
QualityAdvisor combines clinically-proven methods with the nation's largest clinical and financial comparative database of more than 600 facilities to provide timely, actionable information. QualityAdvisor identifies clinical and financial improvement opportunities, highlights drivers of practice variation and monitors adherence to quality of care measures.
"In our most recent Joint Commission survey, our physician practice evaluations received high marks," said Pamela Warner, administrative director of Medical Staff Services at Valley Baptist Health System-Harlingen (Texas). "The surveyor was fully aware that we use QualityAdvisor and what it can do. The wonderful thing is, you can run physician-specific core measures and the Joint Commission really likes that. QualityAdvisor helped make our survey extremely easy."
Said Bryan Bowles, national director of Quality for Premier Healthcare Informatics, "Hospitals with readmission rates over expected will be subject to a 3 percent cut to all Diagnosis Related Groupings. That alone is expected to reduce hospital payments by a projected $7.1 billion cut over 10 years. The new landscape requires action aimed at understanding, quantifying and eliminating preventable readmissions. QualityConnect enables healthcare organizations to effectively manage readmissions and improve the care transition performance."
As a part of QualityConnect, Premier Clinical Client Services teams made up of on-site performance engineers help create processes around OPPE and Focused Professional Practice Evaluation (FPPE) in anticipation of The Joint Commission surveys. Through methodologies such as the National Quality Forum's "Hospital Performance: Additional Priority Areas" and the CareScience® Risk Adjusted Average Length of Inpatient Hospital Stay Measure, patient outcomes metrics are used to trend patient demographics, treatment patterns, patient flow, resource utilization, provider comparisons, and events after admission and their resulting impacts in order to improve the quality of care provided while safely reducing costs.
Leveraging clinical process expertise and knowledge from national collaboratives such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services/Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration™ (HQID), the model for value-based purchasing legislation; the QUEST®: High Performing Hospitals collaborative; and Premier's new ACO collaboratives, QualityConnect members also benefit from the best practices of top performers and learn common elements of successful collaboration.
QualityConnect also provides access to the Premier Performance Improvement Portal™, a library of industry best practices, as well as a networking community for knowledge sharing and interaction with industry specialists, hospital and health system peers and Premier's knowledge experts.
Female physicians may offer improved patient outcomes