Hospital Collaborative Finds Sharing Data Saves Costs, Lives

In the process, 32 hospitals were able to simultaneously move themselves to the "top performance threshold" in all three area at the same time improving in the areas of cost, quality, and mortality, DeVore said.

"There was clear executive leadership that was required in top performers and a clear line of site, so that top performers understand patient-centered care and understand how their mission translates all the way to performance," DeVore said.

"It is sort of that road to high-value healthcare if you think about it that way," DeVore said. "And knowledge transfer—it's the thing that's hardest [to achieve] in the healthcare industry. Today it takes 17 years to get standard practice implemented across the country. We're trying to condense that into a year or two years or three years so that we can get standard practice implemented more quickly."

The challenge the participating hospitals had "quite frankly is they did all this with basically no reward," DeVore said. "There is no reward pool. There is no financial incentive."

"In fact, there are financial disincentives to doing this because it might affect their revenue streams, and payers don't share the money back with them. They've done it anyway because they think it's the right thing to do for patients," she said.