Value-Based Reimbursement Models Drive Clinical Improvement Strategy
As a greater percentage of hospital payments are through value-based contracts, hospitals that reduce costs while maintaining quality will survive, predicts Pam Rush, cardiovascular clinical service line program director at Allina Health.
“How do we improve outcomes and decrease costs?” Rush asked participants in the March 2018 webinar, Predictive Healthcare Analytics: Four Pillars for Success. “We need to start to look at the world differently.”
How can we be more creative and do things differently? How can we use different members of the healthcare teams in new ways, such as nurse practitioners or advanced practice providers, she added. In addition, “we need to invest in data analytics and data resources and have data analysts who can pull the information for us so we can find the variation. We need to invest in physician and caregiver time to look at the data, to make changes in how they improve care, to monitor and see what is working and what doesn’t work.”
These four pillars…population health management, reducing clinical variation, testing new care processes and new models of payment, and leveraging cutting edge technologies…have been critical to the work at Allina Health System’s Minneapolis Heart Institute Center for Healthcare Delivery Innovation, said Rush.
In population health management, we’re looking at how can we focus on adherence to guidelines, identify where there are gaps in care and partner with people across the system, primary care and specialists, to improve consistency and adherence to guidelines, she explained.
Allina is reducing clinical variation by looking at unnecessary variations in care where there is inconsistent care without an influence on outcomes.
“We’re also looking at new ways of doing things. How can we use our nurse practitioners, how do we care for patients once they’re discharged from the hospital and bring them back in for clinic visits? It’s really looking at the care model and how we can do things differently to reduce total cost of care,” she said.
In cardiology, there are so many new devices, procedures and techniques to monitor, said Rush, but we need to figure out who are the right providers to do that monitoring, who are the right patients to do these expensive procedures on and who achieves the best outcomes, because we can’t afford to do all of this new technology to every single person.
Allina looks at these four pillars across the continuum. Starting in primary care to partner on prevention strategies, moving to who gets referred to cardiology, and when they’re referred to cardiology, what are the set of tests or treatments and guidelines to adhere to along the continuum to subspecialties, emergency services and all the way up through advanced therapies, such as transplant.
During the webinar, Rush along with Dr. Steven Bradley, cardiologist, MHI and associate director, MHI Healthcare Delivery Innovation Center, shared these four pillars of predictive analytics success along with details on creating a culture of quality and innovation, building performance improvement dashboards, as well as several case examples of quality improvement initiatives contributing to these savings and much more.
Listen to Ms. Rush describe how MHI leveraged an enterprise data warehouse to identify care gaps and clinical quality improvement opportunities.
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