Better together: Tenn. hospital collaborative boosts outcomes, saves millions
Study: Sharing data, comparing results led to improvements
Topics: Outcomes, Quality, Performance Improvement, Cost Management, Margin Performance, Finance, Surgery, Service Lines
January 26, 2012
A Tennessee quality collaborative helped 10 hospitals substantially improve surgical outcomes and save millions of dollars, a recent study in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons shows.
The 10 hospitals—including Johnson City Medical Center, Erlanger Medical Center, and Parkwest Medical Center—participated in the Tennessee Surgical Quality Collaborative (TSQC), which is coordinated by American College of Surgeons' (ACS) National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP).
The TSQC evaluated participating hospitals in 20 categories of postoperative complications, 30-day mortality rates, and hospital costs associated with postoperative complications. The study included about 14,000 surgical cases in 2009 and nearly 15,000 cases in 2010.
According to the findings, complication rates at participating hospitals improved significantly. For example, the hospitals saw a 25% reduction in acute renal failure and a nearly 19% decrease in superficial site infections.
The improvements saved the hospitals almost $2.2 million per 10,000 general and vascular surgery cases in 2010, compared with 2009 data. ACS said cost savings likely were even better than results show because NSQIP only collected data on a sample of cases.
"We demonstrated that hospitals in a collaborative can greatly improve their quality by sharing data, comparing results and evaluating best practices and process improvement approaches with their peers," says study author Joseph Cofer, a surgery professor at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine-Chattanooga (McKinney, Modern Healthcare, 1/24 [subscription required]; Medical News Today, 1/25).
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