Summary
As the health care reform march continues to drone on in D.C., we continue to hear naysayers claim that saving money will result in losing lives. Once again, in the results of the most recent study from the Premier health care alliance's national collaborative, QUEST: High Performance Hospitals, the Cassandras have been proven wrong.
Analysis
At the beginning of QUEST, which stands for Quality, Efficiency, Safety, and Transparency, 157 hospitals voluntarily came together for this three year project to "answer the very difficult questions: How do you simultaneously improve cost, quality, mortality, harm, and patient satisfaction at the same time", said Susan DeVore, Premier's President and CEO, at a Washington D.C. conference unveiling the results this past week. These hospitals all agreed to share their data--the good, the bad and the ugly.
In just the first year, the QUEST hospitals reduced the cost of care by an average of $343 per patient and increased the delivery of recommended care by 8.74%, improving the delivery of every recommended evidence-based care measure to an average of 86.3%. In addition, the hospitals reached a 14% reduction in observed mortality compared to what was expected based on severity of illness of patients. In the process, 32 hospitals simultaneously moved themselves to the "to performance threshold" in all three areas improving cost, quality, and mortality. These hospitals achieved all this despite getting no rewards, and, in fact, financial disincentives to do this as a result of adversely affected revenue streams and payers' unwillingness to share any of the savings with them.
Extrapolating the identified $577 million in cost savings and 8043 lives saved in these 157 QUEST hospitals to all 5700 nonfederal hospitals nationwide, the cost savings would be nearly $21 billion, while saving 292,000 lives, triple the widely quoted number of preventable deaths in American Hospitals found by the Institute of Medicine published a decade ago next month.
Companies, besides Premier, Inc. poised to benefit from the results of just the first year of this study include:
1. IBM;
2. CSC;
3. Hewlett Packard;
4. Dell; and
5. Accenture.
