QUALITY: What If All Patients Could Go to a "Benchmark Hospital"? Part I

This week's Modern Healthcare shares the 15th annual "100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success" list. Turns out hospitals well-run from a business perspective are also good places for patients to get care. Quality care saves both money (lots of it) and lives (lots of them, too).

Calculated by Thomson Healthcare, the list first came across my radar last April when Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein wrote an excellent piece highlighting it. Thomson ranks hospitals in eight areas, including risk-adjusted clinical factors (such as mortality and adherence to evidence-based procedures), as well as operating efficiency and financial performance.

As Pearlstein writes, "financial performance measures such as cost, profitability, cash-to-debt ratio and growth in patient volume...turn out to correlate surprisingly well with medical performance." Please note that this isn't about big profits - this is about sound financial management, a result of competent administration.

Thomson uses the performance of the top hospitals to create benchmarks--targets for performance and metrics for comparison among all U.S. hospitals--in each of the eight areas. The collective excellence of these 100 hospitals sets the bar for the eight values of performance to which all other hospitals should aspire.

Yet the most important numbers crunched in the report tells us exactly why other hospitals should strive for excellence:

...if all Medicare patients had received the same level of care as patients at the benchmark hospitals:

• More than 123,000 additional lives would have been saved.
• Nearly 139,000 other patients would have avoided complications.
• Total expenses would have declined by $6.2 billion.
• The average patient stay would have decreased by more than half a day.

Yes, you read that right. If all hospitals were living up to the benchmarks, 123,000 lives would be saved AND health care spending would be reduced by $6,200,000,000.

I'll post more tomorrow with reflections about how to get from here to there.