Healthcare organizations join Dartmouth Institute in collaborative
Six prominent healthcare organizations and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice today announced a first-of-its-kind collaboration to share data on costs, outcomes and quality in a broad effort to improve clinical outcomes while reducing costs.
Those involved are the Cleveland Clinic, Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Denver Health, Geisinger Health System, Intermountain Healthcare and Mayo Clinic. They serve a combined patient poplution of more than 10 million people and, via data sharing and analysis of patient visits, intend to create best practices and optimum care models that can be replicated at other health systems across the country.
"The intractable problems of quality and cost cannot be solved without getting to the fundamental issue of how we deliver healthcare in this country," said Brent James, MD, chief quality officer at Intermountain Healthcare and executive director of the Intermountain Institute for Health Care Delivery Research in Salt Lake City. "By collaborating to gather data and identify the most effective care models, we can address variation in treatment, cost and outcomes to give patients the quality care they need and bend the cost curve down in a meaningful way."
The collaborators will focus initially on eight conditions that have seen costs escalate rapidly in recent years and have seen wide variations in outcomes across the country. The collaborative will first analyze total knee replacement, a procedure that is performed more than 300,000 times a year with costs that range from $16,000 to $24,000. Other conditions that will be studied by the collaborative are diabetes, heart failure, asthma, weight loss surgery, labor and delivery, spine surgery and depression, which together amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in direct medical costs each year.
"If we know that the treatment path for diabetes at one institution results in better clinical outcomes, higher patient satisfaction and lower overall costs, then there is knowledge to be shared and replicated in other institutions," said Robert Nesse, MD, CEO of the Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic Health System and a member of the Mayo Clinic's board of trustees. "We need to learn from each other and put systems in place that ensure that every patient gets the very best, most appropriate care every time."
The Dartmouth Institute, based in Lebanon, N.H., will coordinate data sharing and analysis and report results back to the collaborative members to inform development of best practices. The Dartmouth Institute has 20 years of experience analyzing Medicare claims data and disseminating the findings. This same expertise will be applied to the work of the collaborative.
"In my view, the most critical piece of this initiative is the transfer of knowledge to other health systems," said Glenn Steele, MD, president and CEO of the Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger Health System. "We need to aggressively implement a rapid learning network to disseminate our work and assist other systems in implementing these best practices, especially the highest cost systems."
