FIVE TAKE AWAYS

A VALUE-BASED APPROACH TO PERIOPERATIVE CARE: IMPROVING OUTCOMES AND REDUCING COSTS THROUGH A SHARED-SAVINGS MODEL

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Organizations that want to successfully migrate to value-based care must understand how to align internal processes with new payment models.

These five takeaways were presented in a webinar on Dec. 6. The entire webinar can be accessed at ModernHealthcare.com/perioperative.

Develop collaborative partnership

Health systems with constrained resources are challenged to succeed in a value based world. Teaming with innovative industry partners who share your commitment to value can help provide increased bandwidth and achieve meaningful results more quickly. For example, Medtronic provided a South Florida hospital with guided training in hysterectomy procedures by offering their expertise and resources to help hospital staff standardize surgical techniques more effectively.

2 Optimize preference cards

Physician preference can lead to significant staff confusion and further increase variability. According to Medtronic, costs for managing up to thousands of physician preferences can account for variability and impact the facility’s spend on equipment, along with hours of time. Ensure that clinicians keep their preference cards up to date, or even allocate outside resources to help manage. This can help reduce complexity, line-item counts, inventory space requirements, staff time, and supply errors.

3 Reduce variations within your system

One way to help your facility successfully transition to value in perioperative care is through standardization and a reduction in variability. Putting in pathways that are agreed upon by providers can reduce procedure complications and overall length of stay for patients. But, this is a huge challenge for most providers. “Only about 50% of clinicians follow established guidelines,” said Dr. Stuart Hart, Director of Global Medical Affairs for Medtronic. “This leads to improper prevention, diagnosis and treatment, which can contribute to an estimated $650 billion in wasted healthcare expenses annually.” Starting points include developing new protocols for post-op areas, such as pain control or fluid management, and standardizing less consequential items like specimen bags.

4 Provide individual scorecards to physicians

Scorecards are a great way to help physicians track their own progress. Scorecards can measure areas like average cost, readmission rates, OR times, average length of stay, and more. And from a system perspective, having this information for all clinicians gives executives a complete picture and transparency to evaluate organization wide perioperative performance.

5 Create a supportive administrative team

Strong collaboration between administration and physicians is an important area of success in value-based care. “You must be amenable to a multidisciplinary and collaborative team approach toward solving problems,” Dr. Hart said. “In order to lower costs and improve clinical outcomes, it’s essential to improve the skill sets of your physicians, and utilize the expertise and talent of everyone inside the organization.”