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Better Teams. High Reliability Systems. Sustained Culture Change. |
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Are You Ready for Value Based Purchasing?
By Steve Harden
By 2012, for the first time ever, CMS will begin paying for a combination of the patient's outcome and the patient's satisfaction. This system of payment is known as Value Based Purchasing (VBP). Experts believe this change in the way service is reimbursed can affect up to 10% of the revenue your hospital receives. Even if your hospital doesn't have a lot of Medicare patients, history suggests that private payers will not be far behind. VBP, in some form, is headed to your hospital.
VBP comes from the new health care reform bill, The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The bill states "the Secretary shall establish a hospital value-based purchasing program...under which value-based incentive payments are made in a fiscal year to hospitals that meet the performance standards."
VBP connects the dots on previous programs like hospital acquired conditions (HAC), payment for performance (P4P), HCAHPS, Never Events and Core Measures. If you ask a hospital CFO to estimate the amount of revenue at risk under HAC, Never Events, and P4P, most of them can get to 5-10 percent of revenue pretty quickly. Hospitals should have a new urgency to understand how to succeed in a VBP environment.
In a nutshell, your hospital can protect its income by doing two things:
- Get physicians to follow clinical guidelines (Standardization and Compliance), and thus get successful patient outcomes;
- Get great patient satisfaction survey scores.
You can prepare for this environment now by implementing a CRM or TeamSTEPPS-based patient safety program. These programs do four things that will help you succeed in VBP:
- Teaches your Leadership the action to take to create "structure" that permanently changes culture and rewards standardization and compliance;
- Provides the teamwork and communication training to enable the uncompromising willingness to speak up and hold one another accountable to standards of performance;
- Shows your clinicians how to conduct meaningful, customized, site-specific systemization (e.g. checklists, etc.) of processes allowing for prediction of next steps, mutual support, and cross checking.
- Provides the driver for getting "Overall Excellent" and "Would Recommend" on your Patient Satisfaction Survey results.
Under VBP, you put your revenue at risk if you can't get your clinicians to follow guidelines and you can't get great patient satisfaction scores. If not a CRM or TeamSTEPPS type program, what's your plan to make those happen?
Bonus for August
The first five folks to email me will get free advice on either of these two topics:
- How to get physician partnership in getting compliance with clinical guidelines; or,
- What to do to improve your "Overall Excellent" or "Would Recommend" satisfaction responses.
No sales pressure, sneaky sales tricks, arm twisting, or cajoling. Just honest, straight-forward advice drawn from 10 years of experience of helping hospitals. |
| LifeWings Partners is the industry leader in using aviation safety, leadership, team building, and human factors tools to reduce patient-harming medical errors and improve safety and quality. Over 95 health care organizations in 29 states have implemented the LifeWings Patient Safety System. Learn more by visiting www.SaferPatients.com today. |
