Medical Device Daily
ATLANTA – The U.S. doesn't have healthcare coverage for its entire population. This one sentence alone can often times be embarrassing for Premier Healthcare Alliance (San Diego) CEO Susan DeVore when she travels to another country. Not only do some other countries provide coverage for the majority of their populace, but these nations do it at a less costly rate and they have better clinical outcomes for patients.
DeVore, who took the helm of Premier, an alliance of 2,300 U.S. hospitals and 64,000-plus other healthcare sites last year (Medical Device Daily, March 18, 2009), spoke to a small audience yesterday at the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS; Chicago) 10th annual conference held here at the Georgia World Congress Center.
She took part in one of HIMSS' view from the top sessions, a special kind of meeting where participants and attendees received a chance to question experts who were involved in healthcare reform. DeVore's session title was “Data-Driven Quality: Getting More Bang for your HIT Buck.“
“I travel throughout the world and the most embarrassing thing to me is that [the U.S.] doesn't provide coverage for [everyone],“ she told the audience. “Now I wouldn't like to get my care anywhere else but here – the technology is better – but the expense is higher and with poorer outcomes [for patients].“
Statistics from the World Health Organization (Geneva) show U.S. healthcare costs nearly 50% more per capita than in any other country. Most data seems to indicate that the U.S. is constantly falling behind in healthcare practices.
“Unless we're going to ration care, we're absolutely at the point where we have to change [healthcare practices],“ she said. “This is the decade we have to make a difference.“
She also noted the huge variations in the cost of a Medicare enrollee from state to state.
“When you've got the cost of a Medicare enrollee ranging from $6,000 to $16,000 something is wrong,“ she said.
DeVore said that to make that difference it would be up to healthcare providers than with legislation to initiate to change.
She cited data from the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID), which was a sponsored partnership with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). The premise, according to DeVore, was that if you pay a hospital for its success then the quality of care will essentially go up.
The project with CMS yielded a boost in overall quality scores by an average of 17 percentage points throughout four years for the 30 standardized care measures covering five clinical areas of interest (MDD, Aug. 19, 2009). These areas were heart attacks, coronary artery by pass grafts, heart failure, pneumonia, and replacements of hip and knee joints.
DeVore pointed out how successful the partnership was and said that through it the Premier Healthcare hospitals were seeing vast improvement and making tremendous gains.
She also added that there was tremendous progress being made in leveraging data to target waste.
These include:
• staffing productivity,
• unnecessary testing,
• hospital-acquired conditions and infections,
• non-standardization of high value items,
• readmissions,
• medication errors,
• contract non-compliance and;
• pharmacy utilization.
But having strong data isn't always enough and she said that her biggest fear was that the U.S. will became a “data dump“ for good information, but will lack a strong foundation to implement the changes or highlight the strengths the data would suggest.
DeVore spoke to the HIMSS attendees shortly before she was scheduled to head to Washington to take part in a discussion centered on healthcare reform she told the audience.
Her trip follows President Obama's $950 billion proposed plan that he reported last week. The healthcare reform debate has been contentious at best, drawing fury from both Democrats and Republicans.
“I do think what the public is saying is that we don't want the government making, or insurance companies making, our healthcare decisions, but we want our doctors and physicians making these decisions with us,“ she said. “We see the road ahead and I think this attempt at healthcare reform with all its flaws is directionally right.“
Omar Ford, 404-262-5546