Healthcare financial management : journal of the Healthcare Financial Management Association
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Under the new Value-Based Purchasing program, hospitals will receive incentive payments based on how well they perform on 12 clinical process measures and nine patient experience measures or on how much their performance improves relative to a baseline performance period. It is likely that as many hospitals will be penalized with payment reductions under the program as will benefit from payment increases from the incentive payments. It can be argued that the true significance of the program is not so much in the incentive payments as it is in the measurement tools it provides.
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To make better use of existing operating room (OR) capacity--in terms of both facility space and staffing--Baptist Health Medical Center-North Little Rock established a surgical services executive committee to strengthen performance improvement efforts. Initiatives included the following: Redesigning OR block scheduling Establishing agreed-upon performance metrics for the OR. Developing new processes for managing patients preoperatively.
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Healthc Financ Manage · Jun 2010
Achieving operational efficiencies using a DRG-based tracer approach.
Hospitals can use a DRG-based tracer approach to analyze and correct inefficiencies in the flow of care delivery. The approach works best when the analysis is focused on a high-volume DRG. In the case of Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago, this approach was instrumental in improving efficiencies of care processes associated with DRG 143: chest pain.
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Some of the lessons hospitals that have participated in the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration project have learned include: the need to tie in quality-of-care initiatives to the organization's strategic plan and to incentive plans for all employees, from executives on down; the value in allowing hospital physicians to "own" quality improvement initiatives; the importance of making results of the initiative available to all staff; the benefit of creating best-practice teams to address improvements in specific clinical areas.