Reduce Costs by Increasing Value to the Patient from H and HN

By Jeffrey D. Selberg January 12, 2012

Encouraging healthier behaviors, respecting patients' time, coordinating care, promoting smart shopping and reforming payment systems — all will provide better value to the patient and lower costs.

An all-too-familiar institutional response, when facing the challenge of reducing health care costs, is to reduce health care benefits. But that approach entails limiting access to care, lowering health quality, and increasing out-of-pocket costs for patients — all of which run contrary to better health and better care at a lower cost.

A better way — and one that aligns with patient-centered care — is increasing value to the patient. We can do that by reducing waste and rewarding quality.
The Scope of the Waste Problem

Noriaki Kano, the renowned expert on quality management known for his leadership on customer satisfaction, identified six categories of waste in health care that are especially relevant: delay, rework (performing the same task a second time), overproduction, movement (unnecessary transportation of people, products or information), defects, and waste of spirit and skill.

For the full article please go here.

Americans hit the brakes on health care spending from MSNBC

U.S. healthcare spending barely rose in 2010 from record-low recession levels, as high unemployment and the loss of private health insurance forced many Americans to delay or forego medical treatment, government officials said on Monday.

Spending edged up 3.9 percent, bringing the total size of the U.S. healthcare system to $2.6 trillion, or $8,402 per person, according to a report released by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, and published in the journal Health Affairs.

Growth in 2010 was only a slim 0.1 percentage point higher than the 3.8 percent recorded in 2009, which was the lowest rate recorded in half a century. Per capita health spending in the United States is still the highest worldwide.

"It's absolutely clear what's going on," said William Galston of the Brookings Institution. "People's budgets have been hard-hit, and even if they have 20 percent co-pays from their insurance companies, that 20 percent may still be too much."

For the full article please go here.

Berwick: How Health Care Can Trim a Trillion in Costs from H and HN

During recently departed Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Don Berwick's return to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's National Forum in Orlando earlier this month, I saw him speak twice — once during a keynote address for all Forum attendees, and during a small press briefing.

During both appearances, Berwick hammered home the pressure the health care industry faces to curb health care spending — and how those ends can be accomplished in tandem with improvements to quality. To be sure, Berwick isn't the first health care expert to link reduced costs with quality improvements, but he believes the system, using principles of the Lean and quality improvement movements, could stand to trim a staggering $1 trillion — or what he estimates as roughly a third of overall U.S. health costs.

For the full article please go here.