Tag Archives: Productivity

Reducing Waste in Health Care

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Posted by: Joel Wittman 

The discussions continue about the ways that  waste and overspending can be  restrained in our domestic health care system.  With health care expenditures soon to approach 20% of the GDP, the matter is increasingly more important.  Recent studies and policy papers have addressed this issue.

With the Institute of Medicine concluding that the U.S. healthcare industry wastes about $750 billion a year, hospitals need to understand the types and levels of waste, as well as the barriers to eliminating it.

A Health Affairs policy brief published yesterday points to care delivery failures, poor care coordination, overtreatment, administrative complexity, pricing failures, and fraud and abuse as the greatest drivers of waste in healthcare.

Former CMS Administrator Donald Berwick has also called on healthcare leaders to focus on these six categories of waste that account for more than 20 percent of escalating healthcare expenditures.

For instance, poor execution of care delivery processes not only leads to higher costs but also patient injuries and low clinical outcomes, the policy brief notes.

It also recommends addressing fragmented care to prevent unnecessary hospital readmissions and avoidable complications. With poor care coordination, costs can jump by $25 billion to $45 billion a year.

Overtreatment accounts for extremely high levels of waste, with defensive medicine as the primary culprit. Doctors have admitted to providing too much medical care, but thanks to malpractice concerns, current reimbursement systems and clinical performance measures, more aggressive healthcare will likely continue.

Higher-priced services that don’t provide greater health benefits than their less-expensive counterparts are another problem plaguing the healthcare system. But some hospitals, including Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital, are starting to say no to expensive drugs and devices that don’t guarantee value.

The industry also needs standardized forms and procedures to get rid of complex and time-consuming billing work for providers. In fact, about 30 percent of every healthcare dollar goes toward paperwork and administrative tasks, Forbes reported.

However, the policy brief noted, eliminating waste in healthcare gets even more complicated with fears that cost-curbing efforts will jeopardize or ration patient care.

The policy brief follows:

A third or more of what the US spends annually may be wasteful. How much could be pared back–and how–is a key question.

What’s the issue?
Health care spending in the United States is widely deemed to be growing at an unsustainable rate, and policy makers increasingly seek ways to slow that growth or reduce spending overall. A key target is eliminating waste–spending that could be eliminated without harming consumers or reducing the quality of care that people receive and that, according to some estimates, may constitute one-third to nearly one-half of all US health spending.

Waste can include spending on services that lack evidence of producing better health outcomes compared to less-expensive alternatives; inefficiencies in the provision of health care goods and services; and costs incurred while treating avoidable medical injuries, such as preventable infections in hospitals. It can also include fraud and abuse, which was the topic of a Health Policy Brief published on July 31, 2012.

This policy brief focuses on types of waste in health care other than fraud and abuse, on ideas for eliminating it, and on the considerable hurdles that must be overcome to do so.
What’s the background?
Many studies have examined the characteristics and amounts of wasteful or ineffective US health care spending in public programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, and in care paid for by private insurance as well as out-of-pocket by consumers. By most accounts, the amount of waste is enormous.

THE COST OF WASTE: By comparing health care spending by country, the McKinsey Global Institute found that, after controlling for its relative wealth, the United States spent nearly $650 billion more than did other developed countries in 2006, and that this difference was not due to the US population being sicker. This spending was fueled by factors such as growth in provider capacity for outpatient services, technological innovation, and growth in demand in response to greater availability of those services. Another $91 billion in wasteful costs or 14 percent of the total was due to inefficient and redundant health administration practices.

By looking at regional variations in Medicare spending, researchers at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice have estimated that 30 percent of all Medicare clinical care spending could be avoided without worsening health outcomes. This amount represents about $700 billion in savings when extrapolated to total US health care spending, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

More recently, an April 2012 study by former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Donald M. Berwick and RAND Corporation analyst Andrew D. Hackbarth estimated that five categories of waste consumed $476 billion to $992 billion, or 18 percent to 37 percent of the approximately $2.6 trillion annual total of all health spending in 2011. Spending in the Medicare and Medicaid programs, including state and federal costs, contributed about one-third of this wasteful spending, or $166 billion to $304 billion (Exhibit 1). Similarly, a panel of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimated in a September 2012 report that $690 billion was wasted in US health care annually, not including fraud.

Exhibit 1
Download Powerpoint Slide

CATEGORIES OF WASTE: Researchers have identified a number of categories of waste in health care, including the following:

  • Failures of care delivery. This category includes poor execution or lack of widespread adoption of best practices, such as effective preventive care practices or patient safety best practices. Delivery failures can result in patient injuries, worse clinical outcomes, and higher costs.

    A study led by University of Utah researcher David C. Classen and published in the April 2011 issue of Health Affairs found that adverse events occurred in one-third of hospital admissions. This proportion is in line with findings from a 2010 study by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General (OIG), which found that Medicare patients experienced injuries because of their care in 27 percent of hospital admissions.

    These injuries ranged from “temporary harm events,” such as prolonged vomiting and hypoglycemia, to more serious “adverse events,” such as kidney failure because of medication error. Projected nationally, these types of injuries–44 percent of which were found to be clearly or likely preventable–led to an estimated $4.4 billion in additional spending by Medicare in 2009, the OIG found. Berwick and Hackbarth estimate that failures of care delivery accounted for $102 billion to $154 billion in wasteful spending in 2011.

  • Failures of care coordination. These problems occur when patients experience care that is fragmented and disjointed–for example, when the care of patients transitioning from one care setting to another is poorly managed. These problems can include unnecessary hospital readmissions, avoidable complications, and declines in functional status, especially for the chronically ill.

    Nearly one-fifth of fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries discharged from the hospital are readmitted with 30 days; three-quarters of these readmissions–costing an estimated $12 billion annually–are in categories of diagnoses that are potentially avoidable. Failures of care coordination can increase costs by $25 billion to $45 billion annually. (See the Health Policy Brief published on September 13, 2012, for more information on improving care transitions.)

  • Overtreatment. This category includes care that is rooted in outmoded habits, that is driven by providers’ preferences rather than those of informed patients, that ignores scientific findings, or that is motivated by something other than provision of optimal care for a patient. Overall, the category of overtreatment added between $158 billion and $226 billion in wasteful spending in 2011, according to Berwick and Hackbarth.

    An example of overtreatment is defensive medicine, in which health care providers order unnecessary tests or diagnostic procedures to guard against liability in malpractice lawsuits. A September 2010 Health Affairs study led by Harvard University researcher Michelle M. Mello estimated that in 2008, $55.6 billion or 2.4 percent of total US health care spending was attributed to medical liability system costs, including those for defensive medicine.

    Overtreatment can also result from overdiagnosis, which results from efforts to identify and treat disease in its earliest stages when the disease might never actually progress and when a strategy such as watchful waiting may have been preferred. For example, in July 2012 the US Preventive Services Task Force recommended against prostate-specific antigen-based screening for prostate cancer because of “substantial overdiagnosis” of tumors, many of which are benign. Excessive treatment of these tumors, including surgery, leads to unnecessary harms, the task force said.

    Overtreatment also includes intensive care at the end of a person’s life when alternative care would have been preferred by the patient and family, or excessive use of antibiotics.

    Another form of overtreatment is the use of higher-priced services that have negligible or no health benefits over less-expensive alternatives. When two approaches offer identical benefits but have very different costs, the case for steering patients and providers to the less costly alternative may be clear–for example, using generics instead of brand-name drugs.

    There is also provision of many services that may once have been considered good health care but that now have been discredited as lacking in evidence of benefit. Under the umbrella of the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s “Choosing Wisely” initiative, nine different medical specialty groups and Consumer Reports have identified a series of regularly used tests or procedures whose use should be examined more closely. In 2013, 21 additional medical specialty groups will release similar lists in their respective fields.

    The National Priorities Partnership program at the National Quality Forum, a nonprofit organization that works with providers, consumer groups, and governments to establish and build consensus for specific health care quality and efficiency measures, has produced a list of specific clinical procedures, tests, medications, and other services that may not benefit patients. The next step is for physicians and payers to change their practices accordingly.

    After requesting public input, CMS on November 27, 2012, posted on its website a list of procedures or services that may be overused, misused, or provide only minimal health care benefits. They include lap-band surgery for obesity, endoscopy for gastroesophageal reflux disease, and lung volume reduction surgery. CMS said that these services may be evaluated to determine whether they should continue to be reimbursed under Medicare.

  • Administrative complexity. This category of waste consists of excess spending that occurs because private health insurance companies, the government, or accreditation agencies create inefficient or flawed rules and overly bureaucratic procedures. For example, a lack of standardized forms and procedures can result in needlessly complex and time-consuming billing work for physicians and their staff.

    In an August 2011 Health Affairs article, University of Toronto researcher Dante Morra and coauthors compared administrative costs incurred by small physician practices in the United States, which interact with numerous insurance plans, to small physician practices in Canada, which interact with a single payer agency. US physicians, on average, incurred nearly four times more administrative costs than did their Canadian counterparts. If US physicians’ administrative costs were similar to those of Canadian physicians, the result would be $27.6 billion in savings annually. Overall, administrative complexity added $107 billion to $389 billion in wasteful spending in 2011.

  • Pricing failures. This type of waste occurs when the price of a service exceeds that found in a properly functioning market, which would be equal to the actual cost of production plus a reasonable profit. For example, Berwick and Hackbarth note that magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography scans are several times more expensive in the United States than they are in other countries, attributing this to an absence of transparency and lack of competitive markets. In total, they estimate that these kinds of pricing failures added $84 billion to $178 billion in wasteful spending in 2011.
  • Fraud and abuse. In addition to fake medical bills and scams, this category includes the cost of additional inspections and regulations to catch wrongdoing. Berwick and Hackbarth estimate that fraud and abuse added $82 billion to $272 billion to US health care spending in 2011.
What are the issues?
Although there is general agreement about the types and level of waste in the US health care system, there are significant challenges involved in reducing it. Much waste is driven by the way US health care is organized, delivered, and paid for and, in particular, by the economic incentives in the system that favor volume over value. An additional problem is that attacking “waste” usually means targeting someone’s income.

In its September 2012 report, the IOM offered 10 broad recommendations for creating a very different health care system in which research, new incentives, partnerships between providers and patients, and a culture that supports continuous learning and development could lead to real-time improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of US health care.

Although the IOM committee that prepared the report did not estimate cost savings, it predicted that implementing these measures would improve care and reduce expenses. The panel’s recommendations included the following:

  • Improve providers’ capacity to collect and use digital data to advance science and improve care.
  • Involve patients and their families or caregivers in care decisions. Increasing comparative effectiveness research may help physicians, patients, and their families make more informed decisions. (See the Health Policy Brief published on October 8, 2010, for more information on comparative effectiveness research.)
  • Use clinical practice guidelines and provider decision support tools to a greater extent.
  • Promote partnerships and coordination between providers and the community to improve care transitions.
  • Realign financial incentives to promote continuous learning and the delivery of high-quality, low-cost care. Numerous efforts are underway among public and private payers to move from the traditional fee-for-service mechanism, which pays based on the volume of services performed, and toward those that pay based on value and outcomes. (For more information, see the Health Policy Brief published October 11, 2012, on pay-for-performance, and the Health Policy Brief published January 31, 2012, on accountable care organizations.
  • Improve transparency in provider performance, including quality, price, cost, and outcomes information. In a May 2003 Health Affairs article, Gerard F. Anderson from Johns Hopkins University, Uwe E. Reinhardt from Princeton University, and coauthors compared US health care spending with those of other member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. They found that the United States spent more on health care than any other country and that the difference was caused mostly by higher prices.

One way to improve transparency and reduce prices is through “reference pricing,” in which an employer or insurer makes a defined contribution toward covering the cost of a particular service and the patient pays the remainder. The objective is to encourage patients to choose providers with both quality and costs in mind. In a September 2012 Health Affairs article, University of California, Berkeley, researchers James C. Robinson and Kimberly MacPherson reviewed how this approach is being tested.

Many of the measures described above are in process, although they are playing out at different rates in different regions and systems around the country. There are widespread concerns about how replicable and scalable some new payment models are, and how soon they will make a major difference in the way care is provided and in what amount. There are also cross-cutting trends, including consolidation of hospital systems and their employment of physicians, which could lead to the provision of more unnecessary services, not fewer.

For example, in a May 2012 Health Affairs article, Robert A. Berenson, an institute fellow at the Urban Institute, and coauthors found that dominant hospital systems and large physician groups can often exert considerable market power to obtain steep payment rates from insurers.

FEAR OF RATIONING: In theory, a focus on eliminating waste in health care could skirt the issue of rationing because wasteful activities, by definition, carry no benefit to consumers. However, there may be a fine line between health care that is of no benefit and situations where the benefits are relatively small, especially in comparison to the cost.

A common example involves continued chemotherapy treatments for patients having certain advanced cancers. These treatments can cost tens of thousands of dollars but extend a patient’s life by only a few weeks. However, restricting the use of such treatments or services can lead to accusations of “rationing.”

To address many Americans’ fear that the Affordable Care Act would lead to rationing, the law specifically forbids the federal government from making decisions on “coverage, reimbursement, or incentive programs” under Medicare that take cost-effectiveness into account, and “in a manner that treats extending the life of an elderly, disabled, or terminally ill individual as of lower value than extending the life of an individual who is younger, nondisabled, or not terminally ill.” The law is silent on any of these activities going on outside of Medicare.
What’s Next?
Efforts to extract waste from the health care system will in all likelihood continue along a range of federal government initiatives, including information technology adoption, pay-for-performance, payment and delivery reforms, comparative effectiveness research, and competitive bidding. Similar programs are also being initiated by state Medicaid agencies and by private payers. In the view of many experts, even more vigorous efforts to pursue the reduction of waste in health care are clearly warranted.

Joel Wittman is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Wagner School of Public Service of New York University.  He is the proprietor of both Health Care Mergers and Acquisitions and The Wittman Group, two organizations that provide management advisory services to companies in the post-acute health care industry. He can be reached at joel.wittman@verizon.net.


Sticky Notes & Pairs: Dial Up Staff Collaboration and Improved Solutions in your Performance Improvement Work!

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Posted by Paloma Medina

Situation: You have an organizational issue that would benefit from the use a team approach. Perhaps you need to update a work flow or improve organizational performance on a specific measure. However, during staff meetings you find that engagement is low, brainstorming lacks innovation, specific people dominate the meeting, and/or inter-departmental tensions impede collaboration.

Solution: Change your meeting structure! The following “Meeting Recipe” will dial up staff energy and lead to better performance improvement solutions!

What you’ll need:

Meeting time of 1 – 2 hours (epending on the depth of the problem or area you’re focusing on)

20 or more sticky notes and one pen per attendee

Dry erase board or flip charts

A volunteer to act as a high-energy facilitator & time keeper

Instructions:

  1. Assign attendees into random or strategic pairs
    Have them sit together in their pairs
    I highly recommend being strategic — think about how pairs might increase collaboration among departments or individuals. You could pair up nurses with providers, administrators with front-line workers, etc.
  2. Pass out sticky notes and pens to each attendee
  3. State the challenge and the goal. Be clear and concise
    For example, “We want to increase provider productivity by 20% in three months” or “We want to improve our patient check-in process to decrease patient and staff stress”
  4. Give individuals 5 minutes to brainstorm on their own ideas for how this could be done
    Rules:
    1. One idea per sticky note
    2. Each attendee must write down  4 – 10 ideas (yes – this is doable!)
    3. At least one idea must be crazy, really fun, or pie-in-the-sky big (I often award candy to craziest ideas — this greatly energizes and revs up divergent thinking)
  5. Have individuals now share ideas in their pairs
    Give them 2-3 minutes per person to share their ideas, call “time” when it’s time to switch and have the other person share
  6. Have pairs generate ideas
    Give them 10 minutes to come up with 10 more ideas with their partners. Ideas can be  completely new or building on each others. Again, one idea per sticky, at least 2 new crazy ideas.
  7. Call everyone back together and round-robin to report back ideas
    Rules:
    1. Have pairs come up and post their sticky notes as they explain their idea onto the dry erase board or flip charts
    2. Hold off on judgement – responses to ideas can only be praise or clarification questions
    3. Limit reporting to 60 seconds per idea – make it a fun but strict cut-off to assure pairs report concisely and energy stays high in the room
    4. If an idea was already presented, just have pairs say “ditto on ___ idea” rather than repeat it
    5. Spread out the area where you’re posting the stickies, the more spread out, the better
    6. Anyone at any point can “build” on an idea that is being presented and write down a new sticky note for it
  8. Everyone vote for their 5 favorite ideas
    Have everyone walk up at once and move around to review the ideas, then “vote” by marking the chosen sticky notes with a star. Give this just 5 minutes for this to assure people move fast and energy doesn’t drop – you’re almost there!
  9. Now re-vote to narrow it down
    Take down all but the top 10  voted-on ideas. Have everyone vote again but this time everyone gets one vote – this will lead you to your top 2-3 ideas to test out.
  10. Decide on next steps
    As a group decide what are the next steps to test out the chosen ideas, include time frames. Have pairs volunteer to take on the tasks. Pairs can them meet outside the meeting to plan how they’ll carry out their tasks. Have everyone report back in a meeting within a week.

After the meeting: Have someone transcribe all the ideas and note which were the highest rated. Refer back to these when you’re ready to try out a new test.

Real-life example:

A New York community health center faced this exact challenge — front-line staff were tasked with improving their productivity numbers but felt frustrated by leadership’s lack of support for their ideas. Months of meetings went by with little improvement in the situation and their numbers remained low.  The front-line workers requested to have a potluck lunch meeting with leadership to re-energize the group and used this “recipe”. They paired up management team members with frontline staff members to break down hierarchy walls. After the meeting both leadership and front line workers reported loving the voting structure and noted the high energy among everyone- a significant change from prior meetings! They now plan on using “pairs” for all of their performance improvement work.

Paloma Medina is an MPA HPAM 2012 candidate with a specialization in organizational coaching and development. Her background is in homeless health care, community development and design. In her spare time Paloma can be found tailoring her clothing, re-organizing her craft supplies or coming up with new toppings for hot dogs.


“My Boss, Ms. Healthcare: Leadership in Action”

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Posted by Jacob Victory

I embrace the theory that leadership is an action-step. And I also think that bosses are an interesting species. It is sometimes hard not to notice themes when colleagues and friends who work in pharmaceutical firms, nursing homes, home health care agencies, hospitals, health care law or managed care organizations describe their bosses. “I need a leader, not a boss!” proclaims one close friend. “She’s a busy regulatory expert who can’t operationalize anything,” says one colleague. Another quips, “I can’t find him. He’s always focused on preparing board documents and is not interested in the day-to-day details.” Yet another smirks, “My boss is so overwhelmed putting out fires and worrying about reimbursement cuts that she rarely provides any direction—so I make the decisions that she needs to make for me!”

One synthesized it succinctly: “Healthcare has too many busy leaders who are focused on changing regulations or survival.” Indeed, healthcare insurance coverage, utilization, care delivery and reimbursement structures are evolving (I won’t use the word “changing”). As a service industry, healthcare is solely about people helping people. What help do our leaders need to manage their people, who can then help others to make this industry churn?

Since most of us work in the health care industry, let’s for a moment assume that we all share the same boss. We’ll call her “Ms. Healthcare” (I say “Ms” strictly based on personal experience, as I’ve had 11 bosses in my career thus far and nine have been women). Ms. Healthcare walks into her office every morning and faces: 1) Clinical staff shortages; 2) Changing regulations; 3) Chronically ill patients who need more coordinated care; 4) Reimbursement that increasingly does not cover expenditures; 5) An inquisitive board who seeks solutions; and 6) Management staff who fear self-implosion if they receive another project to manage—without resources. Let’s also assume that Ms. Healthcare has developed a short-attention span, is anxious, doesn’t espouse project management, and is continually faced with the same six issues I list above.  And with phone calls and meetings that clog her calendar all day, it can seem like it’s an endless cycle. (Luckily, patients continue to be served.)

Ms. Healthcare, being of awesome power and might, feels she can conquer everything. She is bright, hard-working and dedicated. Indeed, Ms. Healthcare has a lot to offer. She is continually chipping away at ensuring efficiencies, new care models, staff development and patient care. I’ve learned a lot from Ms. Healthcare, too. She’s taught me to think at a high-level, that building relationships are key and to have high expectations of myself and others. But let’s consider some easy leadership tips I’ve learned in my own experiences leading people, programs and projects and what I’ve observed in the experiences of others that she can follow to make her day even more productive. If I was her coach, I’d advise her to:

1.  Go to your computer. Find the delete key. Cancel 50% of your meetings. You don’t need them.

2.  Get a pen. Make a list. Prioritize your objectives. Do we really need all those projects completed simultaneously?

3.  Grab the phone. Call your direct reports. Check-in. Do you know how much a “How’s it going?” can re-energize your staff? And how much thinking has been done on staff development and succession planning?

4.  Find a clinician. Ask him what he needs. Are you prepared for what he might say?

5. Call a politician. Invite them to take a tango lesson with you. Could you dare your government to seek your input?

Now, you may think that the five points above are droll or too simplistic. My next five blog postings will address each respective tip in a bit more detail.  Blog postings thereafter will address the other healthcare issues that Ms. Healthcare faces. Leadership is indeed a verb, an action-step. I firmly believe that it can be easy only if its simplest tasks are mastered.

Jacob Victory, an NYU-Wagner alum, is the Vice President of Performance Management Projects at the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. Jacob spends his days getting excited about initiatives that aim to reform and restructure health care.  He’s held strategic planning, clinical operations and performance improvement roles at academic medical centers, in home health care and at medical schools. Jacob also exercises the right side of his brain. Besides drawing flow charts and crunching numbers all day, he makes a mean pot of stew and does abstract paintings, often interpreting faces he finds intriguing.