Summary

The Commonwealth Fund (one of the leading international healthcare philanthropies) has opened a new site--WhyNotTheBest.org. The Commonwealth Fund's new site relies on data from Medicare's Hospital Compare web site and from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems.  However, the new system fills a gap.  Existing hospital ratings systems  don't offer an easy way for them to compare their performance to each other or to obtain resources to help them improve, like this one does.

Analysis

For example, the Commonwealth Fund's new site offers quality improvement tools from groups like the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) famous for its 100,000 and 5 Million Lives Campaign.  These tools and related resources provide case studies of IHI's highest performers so that users can network with people from these top performers. 

Hospitals and health systems are entering a period of rapidly decreasing reimbursment for their basic care delivery.  However, with the incoming Obama Administration (see my previous posts), they are also entering a period of potentially much increased subsidies for their health information technologies implementations to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of their care delivery so that their overall costs stay within or below their lowered reimbursement amounts going forward.

Companies poised to benefit by these two reimbursement trends include:

1.  General Electric;

2.  McKesson;

3.  Siemens;

4.  Eclipsys;

5.  Epic Healthcare Systems;

6.  Cerner;

7.  Hewlett Packard;

8.  CSC;

9.  Accenture; and

10. Perot Systems

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Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.