Regular readers of this space know that I’m both a member of the Massachusetts Health Care Quality and Cost Council (HCQCC), as well as one of its loudest supporters. At a meeting I was, alas, unable to attend last week — the Council outlined its annual goals for Fiscal Year 2008 (remember, the state fiscal year is July to June, not January to December).  They include the following…

Reduce the cost of health care. Reduce the annual rise in health care costs to no more than the unadjusted growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2012.
• Promote cost-efficiency through development of a website providing comparative cost information. Develop a website that will enable consumers to compare the cost of health care procedures at different hospitals and outpatient facilities.
• Reduce health care spending by preventing the need for avoidable hospital stays.

Ensure Patient Safety and Effectiveness of Care:
• Reduce hospital-associated infections (HAI) during FY08. Eliminate hospital-associated infections by 2012.
• Eliminate “Never Events” as defined by the National Quality Forum. Eliminate events that should never happen in hospitals, such as wrong surgery, wrong site, or wrong patient.

Improve screening for and management of chronic illnesses in the community:
• Improve chronic and preventive care. Improve care of chronic diseases, such as congestive heart failure, diabetes and asthma.
• Reduce disease complication rates, readmission rates and avoidable hospitalizations.

Develop and provide useful measurements of health care quality in areas of health care for which current data are inadequate:
• Develop processes and measures to improve adherence to patients’ wishes in providing care at the end of life.

Ensure that health care providers ask about and follow patients’ wishes with respect to invasive treatments, do not resuscitate orders, hospice and palliative care, and other treatments at the end of life. Eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health and in access to and utilization of health care; health indicators will be consistent and consistently improving across all racial and ethnic groups:
• Reduce disparities in health care-associated infections.
• Eliminate disparities in “Never Events.”
• Reduce, and ultimately eliminate, disparities in disease complication rates, readmission rates, and avoidable hospitalizations.
• Reduce disparities in screening and management of chronic illnesses.

Promote quality improvement through transparency:
• Promote quality improvement through development of a website and other materials providing comparative quality information.

 

Needless to say, the proof in this pudding will most certainly be in the eating, as my former boss, former MA Governor Bill Weld used to say.  But with some help from the Administration and the Legislature (let’s see if the Council can get a decent financial appropriation out of the state budget process), the Council can pursue its critical tasks, namely using data and public information to put pressure on us all to get better and more cost effective.

 

It’s funny, though. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on health care services, while acknowledging we need more and better data on cost and quality to improve how and what we spend our resources on, and the Council has to fight to get $1 MM out of the budget process.

 

And “sg” — I didn’t forget about your inquiry about who’s on the Council. Here’s the list. It just makes me nuts that I couldn’t send you a web link. State government needs to get on the train with some of this stuff.  Here they are…

- Dr. Judy Ann Bigby, Secretary of EOHHS (Chair)
- Joseph DeNucci, Auditor (Beth Capstick is his delegate)
- Gregory Sullivan, Inspector General
- Martha Coakley, Attorney General (David Friedman is her delegate)
- Nonnie Burnes, Commissioner of DOI (Kevin Beagan is her delegate)
- Dolores Mitchell, Executive Director of the Group Insurance Commission
- Dr. Ken LaBresh, Health Care Quality Improvement Organization Representative (MassPro)
- James Conway, Institute for Health Care Improvement, Dana Farber Cancer Institute
- Christopher Delorey, President, Telamon Insurance and Financial Network, Mass Association of Health Underwriters
- Robert Seifert, Mass Medicaid Policy Institute
- Dr. Thomas Lee, Partners, Expert in Health Policy
- Joseph Lawler, Gaudrau Group, National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, and,

- Me - Charles Baker, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Non-Governmental purchaser of insurance.

 

My appointment notwithstanding, this is a pretty good group. Katharine London was recently named Executive Director.  She comes from the Attorney General’s Office, and before that worked at the Division of Health Care Finance and Policy.  She’ll be quite good.

Posted by Charlie Baker in Health Care Costs, Transparency