Pay-for-performance has become popular among policy makers and private and public payers.
Hospitals could be given more money from the Government if patients are happy with their care, under Pay-for-performance initiatives.
“Pay-for-performance” is an umbrella term for financial incentives to hospitals, physicians, and other health care providers who focus on the general happiness of their patients. Which are aimed at improving the quality, efficiency, and overall value of health care
The Affordable Care Act includes a number of provisions which are designed to encourage quality of care. The best known programs under the law that would be considered pay-for-performance are Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), groups of providers that agree to be held accountable for the quality and cost of services they provide.Pay-for-performance arose in the early 2000s as concerns about potentially compromised quality and constraints on patients having access to providers of their choice grew from both providers and consumers.
Also, serious deficiencies in the quality of US health care had been highlighted in two major reports by the Institute of Medicine, among other studies. Pay-for-performance, it was thought, was a way for payers to focus on quality with the expectation that doing so would also reduce costs.
Some have concerns that the pay-for-performance model will have negative results, and a few studies have showed mixed or short-lived results in performance scores.
While results are still mixed, a recent study did show positive effects of incentivizing based upon performance within small HER-enabled clinics.
For more reading on the issue take a look at the study abstract here.
To learn more about the ActionCue hospital risk management software click here.
Engage your staff and be ‘amazed’ at what follows. 
Historically, hospitals have adopted a patient-centric mission. But Beryl Companies CEO Paul Spiegelman and Britt Berrett, President of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, part of the Texas Health Resources system, suggest in a recent article that if hospitals can find meaningful ways to raise the morale or their staff (read: happiness), the rest of their clinical and financial goals, as well as their patient satisfaction scores, will follow.
“If you focus on building internal engagement, that will drive patient engagement and loyalty and that will drive financial sustainability,” Spiegelman said. There are many ways to improve morale. Providing the best systems and processes to address your Risk, Quality and Performance Improvement initiatives is a great place to start.
Before you click away thinking this is just a shameless plug for our ActionCue hospital risk management software, take a minute to think about the current system you are using in your hospital to manage your Risk, Quality and performance improvement initiatives. If your hospital is like most, you are still using home-grown paper or excel spreadsheet systems. I am willing to bet you spend an overwhelming amount of time putting together reports for hospital executives that are based on information days, weeks or even months old. And… I’m also willing to wager that you wish there was a better, easier and faster way to do you job.
Current Risk and Quality Management systems in healthcare organizations is the source for a lot of wasted time and frustration in over 70% of hospitals nation-wide. Improving working conditions for all levels of hospital staff (executives, nurses, risk, quality and performance improvement managers) can and will increase staff morale — and in turn, better patient care quality.
So if you don’t smile just a little bit when you think about your current Risk/Quality Management, Performance Improvement system then you need to consider why and what you can do to improve it.
Be happy, try ActionCue Clinical Intelligence.
To read the full article from the Texas Health Resources system, click here.
To learn more about the ActionCue hospital risk management software click here.
The converse side of saving money from the implementation of performance improvement, incident reporting systems, and a culture of quality, is losing a whole lot more due to bad outcomes, poor incident management and patient readmissions.
According to a report out by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), between January and November 2011 hospitals spent $41.3 billion treating patients readmitted within 30 days of discharge. Of that number, nearly 1.8 million readmissions cost the Medicare program $24 billion, 600,000 privately insured patient readmissions totaled $8.1 billion, 700,000 Medicaid patient readmissions cost hospitals $7.6 billion and uninsured patients were readmitted at a cost of $1.5 billion.
Highlighting the need for the healthcare industry adopt new means of tracking adverse incidents, the AHRQ said in the study, “[I]dentifying conditions that contribute the most to the total number of readmissions and related costs for all payers may aid healthcare stakeholders in deciding which conditions to target to maximize quality improvement and cost-reduction efforts,”.
It is this simple task of tracking adverse events which most hospitals have no efficient means of recording and acting on. Recent statistics report that nearly 75% of all hospitals in the United States are utilizing antiquated systems, relying on paper or spreadsheets, for their Risk and Quality Management. However, healthcare is coming around to performance improvement technologies pioneered and perfected in other industries — such as manufacturing — which provide real-time, accurate insight into a hospital’s quality program.
At first it takes some time to understand why an IT approach, to what has traditionally just been a passive reporting method of quality improvement, is preferable. But, it is the real-time insight that a thoughtful algorithm, within an Incident Management Software like ActionCue Clinical Intelligence, can provide which is so invaluable.
In today’s day-and-age, it is no longer necessary for patient safety and hospital management data to be delayed by days, weeks or months. Inexpensive, web-based systems, like ActionCue, deliver immediate information to staff at all levels of a hospital’s organization, allowing for a prompt and precise response to patient safety and healthcare quality issues — improving patient care and reducing hospital costs.
That’s right, Prista is attending another conference. We can’t seem to get enough of seeing our current subscribers and meeting new folks who care as much about Improving Quality in hospitals as we do. Speaking of Quality Improvement and Risk Management in hospitals, the 2014 TAHQ Conference & membership meeting’s theme is Quality & Risk Professionals: Navigating through the changing landscape of healthcare reform. In conversations with many of our subscribers this subject is a common complaint, the difficulties that Risk and Quality professionals face trying to do their jobs with the constant change.
From the TAHQ’s (Texas Association for Healthcare Quality) website, “the purpose of this educational conference is to enhance the knowledge of healthcare professionals working in the area of quality on the changes related to healthcare reform by improving their knowledge of the systems and navigation.” Topics will include: How Positivity Improves Team Performance and Quality of Care, Patient Centeredness, Embracing Complexity to Improve Patient Experience, Preventable Adverse Event Reporting, Patient Centered Medical Home, Population Health, Accreditation Update, and Personal Accountability.
Come See Us! If you are planning to attend the conference you should drop by our booth and say hello.
Not attending? We’d still like to talk to you. Get introduced to ActionCue® Clinical Intelligence by visiting our website at PristaCorp.com.
Not, “are you happy with it.” But, does it actually make you happy? Does it make your job easier and is it improving healthcare quality in your hospital? If your answer is “no” then a closer look at how you are going about your Risk Management, Quality and Performance Improvement in your hospital is in order.
It may sound silly to say that a risk or quality management system can literally bring joy to your job. But, only if you haven’t experienced what a platform like ActionCue Clinical Intelligence can do. The founders of Prista Corporation, and many of our staff, started out where you are, a Risk/Quality Professional tasked with tracking adverse events and reporting data up to hospital executives. Oh, but you also need to continue with your other duties as well, and somewhere in the middle of tracking events and compiling reports you are expected to provide insight on what the data means… it’s overwhelming for even the best of us.
That’s why Prista developed the ActionCue application. They saw a desperate need within healthcare for a simpler way of tracking events, compiling data, providing actionable insight to executives, and making the jobs easier for Risk and Quality Professionals just like you.
A truly effective process is liberating, invisible, and collaborative — not cumbersome and taxing. I like using the old adage, “Many hands make light work.” The beauty of ActionCue Clinical Intelligence is that every level of the hospital organization is involved in the system. Imagine, a Risk and Quality Management program with data and insight at your fingertips, front-line staff on up to executives all working within the same system, benchmarking and reporting all available in real-time. It’s possible with ActionCue Clinical Intelligence.
So if you don’t smile just a little bit when you think about your current Risk/Quality Management, Performance Improvement system then you need to consider why.
Be happy, try ActionCue Clinical Intelligence.
That’s right, Prista is attending another conference. We can’t seem to get enough of seeing our current subscribers and meeting new folks who care as much about Improving Quality in hospitals as we do. Speaking of Quality Improvement and Risk Management in hospitals, the 2014 TAHQ Conference & membership meeting’s theme is Quality & Risk Professionals: Navigating through the changing landscape of healthcare reform. In conversations with many of our subscribers this subject is a common complaint, the difficulties that Risk and Quality professionals face trying to do their jobs with the constant change.