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IHI: Time to Get Serious About Healthcare Quality, Costs
Bisognano noted that two days after the November election, IHI held a meeting with 100 political and healthcare industry leaders such as former U.S. Senate Majority Leaders Tom Daschle, William Frist, MD, Gary Kaplan, CEO of Virginia Mason Health System in Seattle, Christine Cassel, MD, President and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine, and Bruce Siegel, President and CEO of the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems.
What they all were thinking, she said, was that the election changed nothing for most of America. Frist, she said, noted 'that the same people are sitting in the same conference rooms, with the same issues behind the same closed doors.
"But with healthcare, in the last two days, everything has changed.
"There's a sense of certainty about the destination. There are going to be more people coming into the system."
And the challenge is to make sure that costs are lowered while quality improves, two goals that some healthcare systems are finding are not mutually exclusive.
"But what's really causing uncertainty is how do we get there," Bisognano said. "In the last weeks, I've heard more people say, 'Okay. I realize now I have to control my costs,' more than I've heard more than the last 20 years."
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Comments are moderated. Please be patient.
knowwareman (12/13/2012 at 4:19 PM)
According to Press Ganey, ED Length of Stay is four hours, unchanged for a decade. In 1999, To Err is Human alarmed the public with 99,000 preventable deaths a year. Now that we are better at tracking, we know the number is more like 400,000 per year. The IOS says there's $750 Billion in preventable expense every year. And the Wall Street Journal says if we could eliminate that cost it would cut the U.S. deficit in half. In general, Health Care has been admiring the problem of sluggish, error-prone patient care hoping it will go away. It has not. Aggressive application of the Magnificient Seven Tools of Lean Six Sigma would move most healthcare organizations from 3-to-5 sigma in 18-24 months.