To your e-Health!

(Continued from front page)

This e-health initiative, championed by MTC Executive Director Mitch Adams in partnership with the New England Healthcare Institute, has the potential to save 500 patient lives and reduce $275 million in health care costs a year, due to reduced medication errors and adverse drug events, according to a recent study.

The overall goal is to introduce CPOE at every hospital in Massachusetts during the next four years. In addition, the initiative is working to develop a payment model for hospitals to receive reimbursement based on reduced costs to managed care providers created by the introduction of CPOE. An advisory panel has been assembled to study benefit payment and performance models and develop metrics for “pay for performance” incentives.

According to a 1999 publication from the Institute of Medicine, as many as 98,000 Americans die each year due to medical errors, and about 1 million patients are injured. A significant percentage of these were attributed to problems with the delivery of medications in hospitals – either the pharmacy didn’t understand the doctor’s handwriting, there were incorrect doses of the drug, or there were bad interactions with other medications.

The CPOE system creates a sophisticated clinical support network that guides physicians’ decisions, which is programmed into the hospital’s data system at the point of ordering medication, avoiding many of these mistakes. “This initiative will create a higher quality of care and introduce cost-saving technology that will improve the delivery of medication – throughout the Commonwealth,” Adams said.

The first steps of the initiative will be to assess the readiness of hospitals to introduce CPOE into their system of delivery for health care.

The changes required to introduce CPOE into a hospital are both technological and cultural, and this initiative, by working in collaboration with healthcare institutions, hopes to ease transition and shorten the learning curve.

“Adopting CPOE requires hospitals to carefully plan and prepare for its implementation, because CPOE touches so many departments, processes and professionals within the hospital system,” said Bethany Gilboard, director of Health Technologies at MTC. “Working together with the hospitals, we are committed to improving patient safety and encouraging the deployment of technology that supports it.”

Part of the work will be making the business case for the real savings that can accrue by implementing CPOE at all Massachusetts hospitals. These savings accrue not just to hospitals, but to the insurance companies – or, in the vernacular, the payer market.

Using the findings of a study conducted at Brigham and Women’s, based on the introduction of CPOE in the obstetrics department, the initiative plans to build metrics that can be applied to community hospitals to demonstrate the savings achieved. The effort is being assisted by Dr. David Bates, M.D., Dr. Rainu Kashal, M.D., and Dr. Cal Franz, PH.D, the lead authors of the Brigham and Women’s study.

In addition, the initiative will be looking at the different accounting models to document and measure the cost-savings from the introduction of CPOE at a hospital, with an eye to creating performance metrics that all of the major managed care plans will agree to accept in principal.

“We are looking to break down barriers impeding widespread implementation of advanced technologies at hospitals in Massachusetts. Our goal is to improve patient safety and realize cost-savings that improve the delivery of health care in the Commonwealth,” said Wendy Everett, president of the New England Healthcare Institute. “This initiative, with its collaborative approach, is a terrific start.”

Return to front page of Convergence.

“We are looking to break down barriers impeding widespread implementation of advanced technologies at hospitals in Massachusetts. Our goal is to improve patient safety and realize cost-savings that improve the delivery of health care in the Commonwealth,” said Wendy Everett, President of the New England Healthcare Institute. “This initiative, with its collaborative approach, is a terrific start.”