Organizations involved in the mergers and acquisitions sweeping healthcare find themselves facing a daunting challenge: lack of standardization.
At the Becker's Hospital Review 10th Annual Meeting, April 1-4 in Chicago, five thought leaders shared their insights on how hospitals and health systems can cut down on variation to improve patient outcomes.
Three insights on reducing variation in the supply chain:
- Carrie Nelson, MD, system vice president at Advocate Aurora Health (Milwaukee): "In Illinois, we have this blended platform of 3,500 independent physicians and 1,500 that are employed, and so trying to get some standardization across that platform has its challenges. So, we have a clinical effectiveness program whereby we bring physicians together to create their standards of care. When colleagues influence one another, it goes a long way. … We've been able to create a lot of standardization with supply chain and many other clinical initiatives."
- Carl Hall, vice president and general manager for Presource Products and Services at Cardinal Health (Dublin, Ohio): "It's really [about] getting the physicians at the table and understanding the outcome of using a particular product ... [saying,] 'Surgeon X, you used this particular system that was X amount of dollars, and this is how long it took, and this was your outcome. Surgeon Y, you did the same thing, and it was a much lower cost.' Having those benchmarks and that perspective is an area to really focus on in these [higher-cost] clinical areas."
- Jeffrey Cohen, MD, system vice president of physician and provider network development at Hartford (Conn.) HealthCare: "[Reducing variation] is about relationships. It's about setting the 'why' … and then, of course, having physician leadership in those areas. Then, you couple it with really good data to explain why that variation and having 10 spinal implants on the shelves just doesn't work. And what you try to do is get it down to a dual model or something like that, depending on the organization."
Two thoughts on using telehealth to optimize patients' outcomes:
- Cindy Bo, chief strategy and business development officer at Nemours Children's Health System (Wilmington, Del.): "At Nemours, we do have what we call care connect, which is our suite of telehealth services. … As a freestanding children's hospital, we often rely on our community hospitals and adult hospitals to be able to send kids who are going into their ED to be admitted to our system. What we found is that through telemedicine, once you're engaging, let's say, an ED doc at a community hospital and one of our PICU docs or ED docs in our partnering facility ... we're able to stabilize some of the transports."
- Jill Case-Wirth, RN, senior vice president and chief nurse executive, WellStar Health System (Marietta, Ga.): "As we look at emerging technologies ... we always start with [asking], 'What could our EHR do for us? Where are they advancing?' [We] try to be as active as we possibly can within the developmental stages of that particular EHR before we employ additional technologies on top of it. But that ability to build transparency into everything we do — whether it's supply management costs, par levels of supplies that we have, our financial performance as it relates to productivity, and then obviously, the clinical impacts that we have on each and every patient we care for — has really provided us with the most important data on which we can take action and focus our initiatives moving forward."