According to the Charlotte-N.C.-based Premier healthcare alliance, hospitals nationwide could save 950,000 lives and approximately $93 billion over five years by replicating practices achieved by members of the QUEST collaborative, a project launched by Premier in 2007 aimed to help members deliver the best possible care to each patient, every time.
Since 2008, QUEST (an acronym for quality, efficiency, safety, and transparency) hospitals have used transparent and publicly available measures that show that they’ve provided approximately 80,128 additional patients with all appropriate, evidence-based care for all the clinical conditions assessed. avoided 92,000 deaths and saved $9.1 billion in costs—enough to pay the annual salaries of approximately 60,000 primary care physicians.
The 333 participating hospitals set aggressive goals for rapid and sustained improvement; achieving excellence on a number of transparent measures; benchmarking performance against one another; and sharing knowledge to test and then scale strategies that improve the quality, safety and cost effectiveness of care.
These standards were set by evaluating the outcomes of top performers, as well as evidence collected by the collaborative as to the level of improvement that can reasonably be expected. To reach these new standards of top performance, hospitals needed to:
• Reduce mortality at least 31 percent
• Reduce the average cost of care to less than $5,690 per discharge
• Reliably deliver all evidence-based care measures to patients in the areas of heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia and surgical care at least 95 percent of the time
• Improve the hospital experience so that patients favorably rate their stay and would recommend the facility to others at least 73 percent of the time
• Reduce preventable harm events
• Reduce readmissions by 12 percent
“Together we’re showing that there is room for improvement in any hospital, no matter who they are. We all must focus on consistently providing better care,” Thomas Macaluso, M.D., chief quality officer, Memorial Healthcare System of South Broward, Fla, said in a statement. “We’re both learning from and teaching others how to achieve system-wide change that impacts quality, costs and one’s personal care experience.”
