If you read the trade journals for hospitals and health systems, you are reading about cost transformation and cost management. That said, I think this really means different things to different people. In fact, I hear people say “cost” often when in fact they mean “expense”. This minor exchange of words really changes the subject. Today, I want to talk about moving toward cost vs. quality and how it will require two worlds to collide.
I wrote a blog a few months ago about taking a quality approach to ICD10 conversions and to some degree the same discipline will be required to bridge operational and clinical functions – including collaboration from the CFO, finance staff, CMO (Chief Medical Officer), CNO (Chief Nursing Officer) and division/department administrators – to consider quality, safety, patient satisfaction, and financial performance simultaneously. In some organizations, there may be a need to significantly and fundamentally rethink operations and what services and businesses are core to their mission. New productivity measures may emerge and new and different uses of technology may emerge. I think this is a fundamental culture shift which will require collaboration and significant leadership to see it through to completion. This, along with EMR adoption is rightly transforming healthcare and I’m not even talking about “BIG” data yet.
This culture shift should include an evolved IT staff as well. Priorities must be set for integrating and storing data to support these initiatives. The volume of data needed to extract and evaluate EMR patient-level data on a daily basis is not something for Excel. While data visualizations can take many forms, the data analysis for quality and cost has to be repeatable, sharable and trustworthy.
We are already seeing a trend of hospital CFO retirements … and I think there will be more. Tell me what you think?
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