Georgia Hospital Association will be working closely with a national content developer to provide tools and approaches to hospitals.  The improvement model is based on the Institute for Health Improvement (IHI) model. Key will be patient safety leadership & culture of safety.

GHA will introduce the program at the Patient Safety Summit and the GHA Annual Trustees meeting in February and is now kicking off the learning collaborative.  The Care Transition Special Interest Group will be the Advisory Group for the Reducing Readmission learning collaborative.

GHA is recommending the use of the leader action guide and will be determining the interventions and agree upon the measurements.   The interventions will fall into one of the four broad categories: 1) enhanced care and support during transitions; 2) improved patient education and self-management support; 3) multidisciplinary team management; and 4) patient-centered care planning at the end of life.

SBG is proud member of the GHA Advisory Council and is a participant of the Care Transition group.

Deason was first elected to the Board in 1991 and has served continuously since.  He has served as Chairman, President, and a member of the Executive Committee. Deason has participated in many of the Coalition’s most significant projects.

“It is hard to find people willing to volunteer but to have someone volunteer their time for 20 years is truly an accomplishment worthy of recognition,” said Gary Rost, Executive Director of SBG. “I and the Coalition greatly appreciate Deason’ s service and the impact he has had on our mission.”

This new County ordinace, in combination with the City of Savannah smoking regulations, is a big move forward in improving the health profile of our community.

There are some who have viewed this new proposal as a failure. The Commissioners did change some of the recommended language (such as allowing smoking in bars with an over 21 restriction or private clubs) but this is a success.

For Chatham Health Link (CHL), he is now working on using the Mirth Connect Web Services Reader to access the Catalyst Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) data and create a EMPI ID to Provider MRN crosswalk table to be written out to a database table.  This asset will be valuable in reporting provider patient overlap, and enhance encounter tracking over time and across providers. CCSNPC is also working on using a Mirth Appliance to set up parallel message processing.  This will allow them to continue the Orion pilot solution and simultaneously begin implementing the next phase with an independent EMPI solution in a more secure and resilient hosting facility.

CCSNPC would also like to congratulate Jamey Smith, CHL’s hardware manager and Coastal Health District IT staff on attending and completing the training along with Cory.

It was an impressive event and the key note speakers were excellent, most notably Francois de Brantes of HCI3 and Dr. Donald Berwick of CMS.

The theme, “A New Era for Employers: Better Health, Better Care, Lower Costs” succinctly reflected the challenges we have here in Savannah. A lot of information was packed into the conference. Business and Health Coalitions are working hard to improve health and transform healthcare in the midst of many challenges facing all of us and our nation today. The provocative and heady questions and information included:

• “Value Based Purchasing”, paying for what we want – health, excellence, responsiveness.
• How do we create or stimulate Healthcare Purchasing comparable to other industries (product purchasing)?
• How do we achieve better efficiency, quality (and competitiveness), affordability and tools to support related to “Healthcare product delivery” as other companies (such as Microsoft, GE, Delta or other major corporations) have done for years with their various products and services?
• How do we streamline how we do things to achieve universality of measures, costs, objectives?
• How do we incentivize hospitals to want to reduce hospital admissions?
• How do we use our self-insured platforms to do more to accomplish desired outcomes; such as support and implementation of Accountable Care Organizations, Electronic medical Records, and Medical Home/Village approaches?

If I were to boil down the “common denominator” opportunities to make lemonade from the lemons, for coalitions and others concerned about healthcare delivery, it would include the six “lemon issues” Dr. Berkin cited for CMS:

• 1) Failure to coordinate care
• 2) Failures in the care delivery system (never events such as embolism, ulcers, infections)
• 3) Overtreatment problems
• 4) Excessive administration
• 5) Healthcare prices
• 6) Fraud and abuse
• And add a seventh concerning electronic record support and data collection/access.

Healthcare in all its various forms and aspects is a dynamic issue at the forefront of our national politics, public policy and economy, affecting every American.

Thanks to our Savannah coalition, SBG continues to make progress in improving the health and productivity of the people in our community, make healthcare more affordable, and ensure quality healthcare is accessible. I am proud that our Coalition seems to be on the leading edge of tackling the challenges and issues confronting employers and society today.

Sharon Herrera
President, SBG
Director, Human Resources, Lummus Corporation

As a Georgia based health policy and advocacy organization focusing on health care issues from the consumer perspective, they are engaged in a campaign across the state called “Building a Healthy Georgia” where they will have a community forum in Savannah to bring together key stakeholders, health care professionals, the academic community, health care consumers, etc. to have a constructive dialogue on how to face Georgia’s most pressing health issues.

Georgians for a Healthy Future will have an event in Savannah at the Coastal Georgia Center on November 30 starting at 4pm and ending at 6pm.  Everyone is invited but are asked to register. Here is the link for you to register.

Court Needs to Readdress Health Care Reform

For almost two years, Americans have lived in limbo – not knowing if the 2,770-page health care reform law would forever change how we conduct the business of health care. This week, we found out that an answer is not far away. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the legal challenge to President Obama’s signature health care law, which was drafted with little public input; created 159 new agencies, offices and programs; and granted a litany of unchecked powers to a few Washington bureaucrats, most notably the secretary of health and human services.

The nine members of the nation’s highest court will decide not only whether it is constitutional for the federal government to mandate that citizens purchase health insurance but whether the federal government can force states to expand their enrollment in Medicaid.

The legal arguments to be heard in the spring will be the Super Bowl of Supreme Court cases, and the court’s ruling will be one of the most heavily anticipated outcomes in years. It should have a profound effect on the 2012 presidential election as well as the health care industry, which represents more than one-fifth of the entire American economy.

Whether the court throws out the entire law, upholds it or rules parts of it unconstitutional, we believe there is a need to put in place legislation that focuses on a 21st-century model of health care reform, one based on a patient-centered model that lowers costs while improving health outcomes.

Successful health care reform must not be a top-down federal approach but instead one that allows states and individuals to devise health care models that work for them.

Among a few of the principles we would encourage Congress to consider as well:

- Move away from the traditional fee-for-service delivery model toward one based on positive patient outcomes. A 21st-century model encourages patients to be engaged in their own health care and creates incentives for doctors and hospitals when patients get well and less when patients keep returning to hospitals in a revolving-door fashion.

- Advance consumer-directed health care. To empower patients with their own health care, we should reform the tax code to encourage more Americans to set up health savings accounts (HSAs). HSAs would allow consumers to pay for routine medical care, like we do for regular oil changes or tires on a car, and then use high-deductible insurance plans for major medical expenses. That’s the opposite of Obamacare, which taxes and restricts health savings accounts, dealing a blow to consumer-driven health care.

- Stop paying crooks through an aggressive crackdown on criminal activity within Medicare and Medicaid and beef up fraud-prevention programs for state children’s health care plans. Some crooks claim it is more profitable to cheat the government in these programs than to deal drugs. The inspector general thinks nearly 10 percent of Medicare cases are fraudulent. Hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved through better enforcement, whether rooting out nursing homes billing the government for deceased patients or criminals running HIV clinics at the back of pizza parlors.

- Encourage states to enact civil justice reform to prevent frivolous lawsuits that drive up health care costs. A Jackson Healthcare/Gallup physicians poll last year found that $1 in $4 spent on health care is dedicated to unnecessary tests, procedures and drugs that doctors order to prevent being sued. As long as doctors play defense, health care costs will continue to escalate and drive up costs for all of us.

- Create additional federal incentives to ensure nationwide implementation of electronic health records by hospitals, physicians and other health care providers. An electronic platform not only reduces the chance for medical errors in treating patients, but also makes it more efficient and safer to transfer a patient’s history from one provider to another.

These are but a few of the ways we can incorporate solutions that will bring health care into the 21st century, put patients at the center of health innovation and achieve the No. 1 goal of saving lives while saving money.

You can read more details at the San Francisco Chronicle or the Business Insurance.

Health care reform requires commercial insurers spend at least 85 cents out of every premium dollar on medical claims for its large-group policyholders. For small-group and individual policies, the figure is 80 cents. The remaining 15 – 20 percent is used by the insurance companies to cover administrative overhead, commisions, and profits. (See the federal definition here.)

Section 2718 of the Public Health Service Act, as added by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) signed into law on March 23, 2010, requires that beginning in 2011, insurance companies must meet new medical loss ratio requirements.  This law is designed to ensure premium dollars go to health care. (For more information read the Proskauer newsletter.)

Modern Healthcare October 24, 2011