Health system leaders across the country have embarked on restructuring efforts within their organizations to promote the effective delivery of value-based care and to reduce healthcare costs. Results from Chicago-based NeuStrategy's 2014 Neuroscience and Spine Center of Excellence Survey reveal that there has been a rapid evolution of COEs for dedicated neuro-intensive care units in the past decade.
According to the survey, eight out of the 35 participating hospitals across 14 states earned Silver or Gold Comprehensive Neuroscience and Spine COE Designations, reflecting superior performance across several neurological and spine care services.
NeuStrategy's Neuroscience and Spine COE survey is organized around four primary infrastructure components, including programs, staff, facility and technology and business. Answers to each survey question were weighted according to a proprietary algorithm. Hospitals that received a score of 76 to 100 percent were designated a Gold COE; scores of 51 to 57 percent were designated Silver COE; and 1 to 50 percent were designated as having emerging programs.
Statistics and common characteristics of Silver or Gold Comprehensive Neuroscience Designated COEs can be found below:
Program characteristics
- According to the survey results, COEs are three-times more likely to have weekly neurovascular/stroke team conferences and almost four-times more likely to have weekly spine care team conferences than hospitals ranked as emerging programs.
- COEs are twice as likely to participate in comparative effectiveness research and more than seven-times as likely to offer genomics-driven treatment than hospitals ranked as emerging programs.
Staff characteristics
- COEs are 2.5-times more likely to have fellowship-trained neurosurgical or orthopedic spine surgeons than emerging programs.
- COEs characteristically have interdisciplinary care teams that facilitate collaboration among specialized physicians, nurses and allied professionals.
Facility and technology
- COEs are two or three-times more likely to have a specialty care environment with dedicated neuroscience-focused units, advanced technologies and telemedicine programs than emerging programs.
- COEs are twice as likely to have post-acute stroke follow-up clinics and over eight-times more likely to provide high-risk stroke clinics than emerging programs.
- Two-thirds of the designated COEs use telehealth to support 16 or more partner hospitals.
Business
- COEs are twice as likely to compensate team members for inpatient and outpatient quality initiatives than emerging programs.
- COEs are twice as likely to have dedicated executive oversight with access to the C-suite.
Additional characteristics
- Fifty percent of comprehensive neuroscience COE programs have an academic facility.
- COEs treat an average of 5,066 patients per year.
- Seventy-five percent of COEs are level I or II trauma designated.
- Fifty-percent of COEs have more than 750 beds.
- 100 percent of the COEs that participated in the survey were located in urban areas.