Healthcare Transformation -

Deliver Better Quality Patient Care for Less to More

The Challenge:

A leading provider of clinical and operational performance improvement products and services wanted to expand their customer impact and services by providing not only measurement and benchmarking products, but also the means to implement their quality improvement techniques and programs.

To do this they needed to find a way to share best practices, methodologies, expert knowledge, case studies and other tools internally and with their hospitals more efficiently.

For example, as part of this organization’s consultative services a hospital may call in to find best practice information on the operating room and receive detailed steps on scheduling and staffing, process flow and operational efficiencies.

They needed a more efficient way and a single channel for communications, sharing and knowledge transfer to capture this information and make it available to all of their hospitals.

In addition, they needed a solution that would facilitate adding more depth and breadth to the knowledge and a way to ensure the content stays fresh and useful, be easy to use and require minimal time to implement and manage.

They needed a solution to enable clinicians to identify, capture, manage and automatically send best clinical practices using their existing business processes and email systems currently scattered in multiple media and knowledge clusters, email, voice mail, etc.

The Solution:

2.0 Clinical Knowledge Automation & Collaboration Platform

The clinical knowledge automation & collaboration platform they deployed is playing a vital role in the CMS Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID), the first national, hospital-based, pay-for-performance program.

HQID rates the quality of care provided to inpatients suffering from key conditions such as heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia. Top-performing hospitals in the program receive increased Medicare payments.

The results in the first two years it has been running the program in the US include:

• Saving the lives of nearly 1,300 heart-attack patients
• Providing more than 150,000 additional treatments at the highest possible quality care standard
• Reducing heart by-pass surgery death rates to as low as 1.6 per cent and reducing the occurrence of associated complications to as low as 3.9 per cent
• Improving overall quality of patient care by an average of 11.8 per cent