The American College of Surgeons and the Harvard Business School's Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness are launching a program to quantify outcomes and costs of health care to improve both quality and the bottom line.

The new program, to be called THRIVE (Transforming Health Care Results by Investing in Value and Excellence), will be piloted with 10 to 15 hospitals and will focus on measuring the full cycle of care, including surgical, medical, behavioral and social elements, for three surgical conditions.

“We want to reduce the high costs incurred in the U.S. health care sector, but do this in ways that don't compromise the quality of care or a patient's access to it,” says Robert Kaplan, senior fellow and Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus, HBS.

The value measurement process will include risk-adjusted benchmarks so hospitals can compare their results with those at other institutions, and the pilot results will be used to create a scalable approach to be used by hospitals to measure and improve value.

The program is designed to provide better measurement of quality and costs so that hospitals can improve the value to their patients as well as to put themselves in a better position to be successful as reimbursement moves toward bundled payments in the quest for transparency and accountability.

Kaplan adds, “Cutting costs by arbitrary reduction in headcount is not a sustainable solution. True cost improvement requires that we first measure what it costs today to treat a patient's medical condition, and then redesign the care model to deliver the same or, preferably, better outcomes with a lower-cost mix of resources, especially personnel, equipment, devices and drugs.”

“Surgical care is more than just the operative procedure,” says Frank G. Opelka, M.D., FACS, Medical Director, ACS Quality and Health Policy. “Surgical care involves teams of clinicians who begin delivering care in the preoperative phase, include anesthesia, nursing care and medical specialties and continues through to postoperative rehabilitation. As a team, we need to optimize each phase of care to provide the best outcomes for patients and meet their goals.”

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Harvard, American College of Surgeons team up to improve health care quality

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