Health Care Systems to Share Practices on Quality, Costs

(Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality)

Six health care systems in the U.S. announced today a collaboration to improve health care quality while reducing costs. Participating organizations — representing networks of hospitals, clinicians, and researchers — include Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Cleveland Clinic, Denver Health, Geisinger Health System, Intermountain Healthcare, and Mayo Clinic.

The Collaborative, as it is called, promises to share data on outcomes, quality, and costs across several common and costly conditions and treatments. The group will determine best practices for delivering care for these conditions and will rapidly disseminate actionable recommendations to providers and health systems across the United States. The group aims to to improve the efficiency of standard clinical care to reduce the per capita cost for these conditions and to keep costs in pace with the consumer price index.

The Collaborative will initially focus on eight conditions and treatments for which costs have been increasing rapidly in recent years and for which there are wide variations in quality and outcomes across the country: knee replacement, diabetes, heart failure, asthma, weight loss surgery, labor and delivery, spine surgery, and depression, which together amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in direct medical costs each year. The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice will coordinate data sharing and analysis, and report results back to the Collaborative members.

The first target will be total knee replacement, a procedure performed more than 300,000 times a year in the U.S., with a cost that ranges on average from $16,000 to $24,000 per surgery. Collaborative partners will also build metrics to study the care of the other selected conditions at their centers and arrive at best practices. Work to define best practices in diabetes and heart failure care will begin early in 2011.

Update: Text corrected, 15 December 2010

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