The American College of Surgeons (ACS) has announced that leaders from the organization along with Harvard Business School's (HBS) Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, have gathered on Capitol Hill to announce a new partnership aimed at improving healthcare value.
The two organizations discussed a new program, built on their expertise in cost and quality measurement, to help hospitals and surgical practices improve patient outcomes while lowering the cost of delivering care. Better measurement of quality and costs, says ACS, will enable hospitals to improve the value they deliver to patients while positioning them for success as reimbursement shifts to bundled payments, an approach that increases transparency and accountability.
"Surgical care is more than just the operative procedure," said Frank G. Opelka, MD, FACS, Medical Director, ACS Quality and Health Policy. "Surgical care involves teams of clinicians who begin delivering care in the preoperative phase, include anesthesia, nursing care and medical specialties and continues through to postoperative rehabilitation. As a team, we need to optimize each phase of care to provide the best outcomes for patients and meet their goals."
At the event on Capitol Hill, leaders of the program, called ACS THRIVE (Transforming Health care Resources to Increase Value and Efficiency), discussed the challenges the nation's health system faces as it moves from volume to value-based payment models, the changing team dynamics within hospitals, and the new care models that health systems must adopt.
"We want to reduce the high costs incurred in the U.S. healthcare sector, but do this in ways that don't compromise the quality of care or a patient's access to it," said Prof. Robert Kaplan, MS, PhD, Senior Fellow and Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus, HBS. "Cutting costs by arbitrary reduction in headcount is not a sustainable solution. True cost improvement requires that we first measure what it costs today to treat a patient's medical condition, and then redesign the care model to deliver the same or, preferably, better outcomes with a lower-cost mix of resources, especially personnel, equipment, devices and drugs."
Initially, ACS THRIVE leaders will pilot the value-measurement process with 10-15 hospitals in the U.S., focusing on measuring the full cycle of care – including its key surgical, medical, behavioral and social elements – for three surgical conditions. Results from the pilot will be used to create a scalable approach that all hospitals can use to measure and improve value. The method will also include risk-adjusted benchmarks, so hospitals can compare their value with one another to generate system-wide improvement. High-value providers will be recognized, while those with opportunities for improvement can learn from the best practices of the high-value hospitals and health systems.
"We know quality improvement requires accurate and reliable data, with risk and case-mix adjustment," said Clifford Ko, MD, MS, MSHS, FACS, FASCRS, Director of the ACS Division of Research and Optimal Patient Care. "Clinical data, not claims data, are routinely the best data to use. However, data alone are not sufficient. Appropriate and adequate resources, infrastructure and adherence to evidence-based standards are all likewise needed to provide high-value care. ACS has a long history of helping providers and hospitals achieve these aspects reliably."
