IHM’s first webinar was held a few weeks ago. John Herringer, a senior administrator at Joint Commission, graciously gave his time to explain where the Joint Commission’s efforts to credential physicians are heading and to provide practical, detailed insight to our Meditech hospitals .

A webinar, for those who’ve yet to attend one, is a meeting convened around two technologies working wonderfully together: the telephone and the Internet. Best of all: no travel necessary.

Time was when management consultants would recommend “stand-up meetings,” where attendees would remain standing, as the best way to keep meetings from running on ad infinitum. Webinars work even better for staying efficiently on topic. With the discipline of a scripted presentation, respondents answer emailed questions from attendees and cover a lot of ground in the process.

In our case, some 250 CMO’s, Heads of Quality, and leading clinicians from Meditech hospitals around the country attended the meeting—without leaving their desks. Representing dozens of hospitals, almost all of our guests stayed right through, past the 30 minutes we’d scheduled. And there were no mugs to wash, no parking vouchers to stamp. The main drawback? We have to wait to meet you face-to-face.

Please do not miss our second webinar, set for Thursday, May 31th at 1:00 pm, EST. Dr. Charlotte Yeh, MD, CMS Administrator, will speak on “Pay for Performance: What It Means for Community Hospitals” and be available for questions from attendees. This next webinar will be hosted by IHM’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Anita Karcz. Click here to attend.

We’ll be sure to email you an invitation. As always, we’ll be eager to hear what you think.

All the best,

John H. Knowles, Jr.
Executive Director
jknowles@healthmetrics.org

Incentives for Quality Care...Is This the Future?

In the few years since it appeared in health care, pay-for-performance (P4P) has become the industry's latest rage; a hoped-for solution to lapsing quality that might help curb skyrocketing costs. P4P programs offer bonuses to hospitals that score highly on measures for clinical quality. And as such, they create financial incentives for hospitals to provide better care.

More than 50 percent of private HMOs now use P4P, and those numbers are growing. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have also gotten into the game. Since 2005, CMS has run a P4P demonstration project involving more than 250 hospitals, which collectively improved quality from 2.6 to 4.1%, according to a recent analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine. Charlotte Yeh, MD, the regional CMS Administrator for New England, says a federal P4P rollout covering all US hospitals will likely begin in 2009. Read More...

Meeting the Challenge

In the midst of the academic and policy debates, P4P is a growing reality for hospitals around the country. “Our expectation is that this will become a bigger and bigger piece of what we have to do to get paid,” says Sebba of Anna Jaques Hospital, which has an upcoming P4P arrangement with a private payer worth millions. Sebba believes P4P can improve quality, but he emphasizes there's still a lot to learn about how to make it effective. Meeting four-hour windows for antibiotics in pneumonia cases, for instance, requires doctors, nurses, and pharmacists to interact in new ways. “Everyone has to be aware of how important it is,” Sebba says. “And that's where it gets hard—there are an enormous number of people that have to be coordinated to make this happen.”

As an added challenge, quality monitoring requires streamlined data systems, which aren't always amenable to the action on the floor. Most physicians—particularly older, attending physicians—have grown accustomed to "free-form" note taking, whether handwritten or recorded. Electronic medical records are evolving to extract data from free-form narratives, but that's still a touch-and-go process. Read More...

Mother’s Data

This coming Sunday, May 13, is, of course, Mother's Day. No doubt our friends in labor and delivery will know better than most that more mothers give birth on Tuesday than any other day with an average of more than 12,000 births happening on the third day of the week. That's 16 percent more than any other day. This occurs because the majority of doctors do not schedule C-sections or inductions on the weekend. They are postponed until after the Sunday. And as most mothers know, giving birth can take some time, which is why there are more births on Tuesday than Monday.

About Us

The Institute for Health Metrics is a privately funded not-for-profit organization focused on developing an electronic data analytics system to support quality and operational improvement in hospitals and research in public health and healthcare services.

As a central component of its mission, IHM works with a network of leading hospitals and researchers to organize and analyze health information as part of a variety of programs to support quality of care research, measurement, and improvement. We are a trusted intermediary among hospitals who are our business associates in compliance with applicable HIPAA regulations.