Winning Ways
Hackensack University Medical Center (N.J.) and McLeod Regional Medical Center each scored in the top 20% for all five clinical conditions. Hackensack earned the largest total bonus for the first year, receiving $848,000. A hospitalist from each of these institutions shares insights into their success.
Gerard A. Burns, MD, MBA, director of medical informatics at Hackensack University Medical Center, explains that meeting the quality measures set by Medicare for the project was not new. “Some are process measures like giving aspirin, and some are outcome measures, like our mortality rates,” he says. “Many are tried and true, and not totally foreign to all hospitals. We’ve seen these things before.”
A few of the measures require no additional work from staff. “Some are automatically calculated by the Premier databases,” says Dr. Burns. “There’s no data collection involved in some of these.”
Every week or month, each hospital downloads all of the coded data. The facility also receives results on how they are doing. “We get quarterly reports to see where we’re doing well and where we’re not doing well,” says Dr. Burns. “We may see too many re-admits, and ask, ‘What’s going on?’ We’ll take a closer look. Each time is a great opportunity to improve our scores.”
Many, if not most, of the participating hospitals saw immediate improvements for multiple quality measures. The problem is that now that the project is in its last year, it’s more difficult to find ways to improve.
“The big push from here on out is fine-tuning and finding new areas for improvement,” says Dr. Hazelwood. “We hope to plug in new information and improve outcomes. And, by its nature, we’ll have to increase the number of protocols. They help us in the hustle and bustle of daily practice.”
How Hospitalists Help
In a handful of top-ranked hospitals, hospitalists play an active role in helping to meet the quality measures.
“Our hospitalists contribute in three ways,” says Dr. Burns. “We have five full-time hospitalists in the emergency department to assist our ED physicians and admitting physicians. They use specific disease order sets with built-in processes for medications, etc. Using a hospitalist to assist or write these orders is one more layer on the team to ensure we do the right thing.”
In addition, hospitalists at Hackensack are often included in new multidisciplinary team rounds. “We have multidisciplinary teams of a physician—sometimes a hospitalist—along with a nurse manager, a case manager, a social worker, a nutritionist, and sometimes a pharmacist,” explains Dr. Burns. “The team discusses each patient and tries to facilitate the physician’s plan of care. They may have to bring in a coding person to help figure out the coding rules.”
And having hospitalists involved with patients admitted without primary care physicians is “a tremendous help,” according to Dr. Burns, “because they really focus on our care measures. And each month, we have new residents come in, and the hospitalists train them on the project.”
As for McLeod Regional Medical Center, Dr. Hazelwood says, “Hospitalists are big admitters to the hospital—especially for those unassigned patients. And like other physicians, we are involved in various physician-led committees that develop our protocol for change.”