According to Dr. James, “quality costs less” and clinicians now face a tremendous opportunity to reduce costs and drive quality by adopting “an approach to clinical care based on reducing variation and on weeding out inefficiencies and waste,” said Mr. Levy in his post.
In his presentation, Dr. James outlined Intermountain’s approach to reducing clinical variation. Currently, the system’s efforts involve the following steps:
“1 — Select a high priority clinical process;
2 — Create evidence-based best practice guidelines;
3 — Build the guidelines into the flow of clinical work;
4 — Use the guidelines as a shared baseline, with doctors free to vary them based on individual patient needs;
5 — Meanwhile, learn from and (over time) eliminate variation arising from the professionals, while retain variation arising from patients.”
Dr. James noted, however, that the approach allows for physicians to stray from protocols if it is deemed to be in the best interest of the patient.
To read Mr. Levy’s complete summary of the presentation, click here.
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