University of Utah Health Care's value-driven outcomes program has seen an increase in patient outcomes, and an 11 percent decrease in spending, MedicalXpress reported.
Here's what you should know.
1. The program breaks down individual procedures to the "level of each bandage and minutes of nursing time."
2. CEO of UUHC Vivian Lee said the first step to providing value care is to better understand the individual cost components that make up care.
3. For example, the study identified that in knee and hip replacements costs varied greatly between the "nearly identical surgeries."
Using the value-driven outcomes program, the health center identified that length of stay was the reason for the variance in procedure cost.
The issue raised two concerns among physicians and nurses: patients weren't consistently getting out of bed and moving within a day after the surgery, and the longer a patient stayed, the facility utilization cost increased.
To address the issues, the team changed its procedures. They changed the schedule of the physical therapist team so that someone would constantly be available to patients.
4. In the two years which followed, the average length of stay dropped from 3.5 days to 2.9 days, and total cost dropped by 10 percent with 30 percent of the savings caused by the shorter stays. Additionally, standardizing the supplies used in the procedures accounted for 40 percent of the cost savings.
In the area of quality care, patient outcomes improved from 54 percent to 80 percent.
5. The organization saw similar results on two other common procedures. Physicians were ordering too many unnecessary tests, overburdening the lab. A campaign lowered the amount of testing, decreasing mean costs from $138 to $123 a day.
They also utilized the program for managing sepsis. By streamlining procedures and better educating staff of the warning signs, it shortened the average time of administering antibiotics from 7.8 hours to 3.6 hours.
6. The results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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