Slideshow: Balancing Cost Containment and Quality Efforts

Senior healthcare leaders discuss how they are maintaining high quality care delivery while implementing cost containment efforts.

Hospitals and health systems need to keep costs down while simultaneously striving to provide optimal care for their patients. Leaders are examining their cost containment efforts to ensure that the quality of care does not dip as they try to achieve these two goals.

"We try to focus very carefully on our cost-containment initiatives, always being careful to balance them with any downstream effects they might have," says Reza Kaleel, COO of St. Mary's Medical Center in Grand Junction, CO. "But in many cases, reducing costs can actually improve quality. By removing added steps in a complex process, you may remove some of the reasons why errors were made in the first place."

Some organizations have been able to identify key components of their cost and quality efforts. "Benchmarking is a big part of our quality control and cost containment," says Chris McLean, CFO of Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare in Memphis, TN. "We don't just benchmark against ourselves, but against other not-for-profit and even some for-profit healthcare entities. We're open to learning as many best practices as we can so we can implement them."