WESLACO, TX – Knapp Medical Center in Weslaco, Texas, reports saving $2.8 million in one year using a performance improvement program. Knapp executives said the program, developed by the Premier health alliance, helped prevent 27 deaths, eliminate 1,304 days of care, prevent 98 readmission days and avoid complications in 28 cases.
Officials at the 233-bed, not-for-profit hospital began using Premier's QualityConnect and QualityAdvisor solutions in June 2008 in an effort to improve the hospital's clinical performance and support professional practice evaluation efforts, executives said.
According to Knapp executives, the launch QualityConnect in the hospital's Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation (OPPE) program and practitioner profiles, gave physicians access to a database of more than 600 facilities and the ability to benchmark against other "like" hospitals, manage risk adjustment for clinical and financial measures and collect relevant analytics.
"I wouldn't want to return to our old way of doing things before QualityAdvisor," said Ginger Robles, RN, the hospital's director of quality management. "Now it is more exciting because we can see core measures and outcomes by individual physicians rather than just hospital-wide results. This makes a bigger impact with our physicians."
The hospital is using QualityAdvisor information in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Care Transitions Project, which seeks to eliminate unnecessary hospital readmissions. Knapp is one of 14 communities around the nation chosen by CMS to participate in the project.
Robles said the hospital saves time and resources by avoiding manual audits of electronic medical records to identify outcomes. Practitioner profiles are reviewed regularly by department chiefs and presented to physicians at quarterly department meetings, she said. These reports are included in credentialing files and avaiable to the chief of service, who deals with members of the department if there is a problem.
"Doctors are competitive so they don't like their peers to do better than they do," Robles said. "The practitioner profiles also allow us to easily pinpoint who's not doing well so we can work with them. Overall, there has been continuing improvement since the program began."
Knapp executives said the system helped with the hospital's Joint Commission survey in February 2009. Robles attributed part of the success to having physician-specific information easily available through QualityAdvisor.
"It has helped to be able to say about the practitioner profile: 'This is your report,'" she said. Contracted hospitalists, who admit 60 percent of adults, get monthly profiles. Executive leadership team members meet with the hospitalists and their director to review financials and physician profiles from QualityAdvisor, she said.
The doctors "are very, very proactive in wanting to comply with core measures," she said. "They really study their individual reports. We tell them when they are performing well on measures and where they are below expectations."
