Eight major health systems join HVHC to demonstrate improved care at lower costs

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical CenterJun 2 2011

In December, Mayo Clinic, Denver Health, Intermountain Healthcare, Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Cleveland Clinic, and The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI) announced the formation of the High Value Healthcare Collaborative (HVHC) to improve health care, lower costs, and move best practices out to the national provider community. Today, they announced that eight major health systems will join the Collaborative.

In signing on, Baylor Health Care System, Beaumont Hospitals, MaineHealth, Scott & White Health Care, Sutter Health, UCLA Health System, University of Iowa Health Care, and Virginia Mason Medical Center demonstrate their commitment to the Collaborative process, which includes sharing care pathways, costs, and outcomes data with their partners and the public as they adopt best practices and new, expanded standards of measurement.

Dr. James N. Weinstein is Director of TDI and President of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic: "We believe that physicians and health care leaders are in a key position to implement meaningful change that makes care safer, more efficient, more effective, and more attuned to each patient's needs and preferences. At the same time, based on our research and individual experience, we know that by doing this, we actually lower costs."

The new partner members were selected by the founding Collaborative group based on a nomination and review process. Criteria included having strong research and quality improvement processes, a robust health information technology (HIT) infrastructure, a commitment of personnel, operational, and financial resources, and demonstrated experience in collaboration across institutions. They will be assimilated over the next several months to assure a smooth entry into participation in the focus areas of the Collaborative.

Currently, the Collaborative is working together in nine increasingly prevalent condition/disease-specific areas that have been shown to have wide variation in rates, costs, and outcomes nationally. These are: Total Knee Replacement; Diabetes; Asthma; Hip Surgery; Heart Failure; Perinatal Care; Depression; Spine Surgery; Weight Loss Surgery. Additional high variation, high cost conditions that affect diverse populations will be added over time.

Data on Total Knee Replacement, a procedure that is performed more than 300,000 times a year in the U.S., with a cost that ranges on average from $16,000 to $24,000 per surgery, has been collected from the founding institutions and is currently being analyzed. Data analytics are facilitated through The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI), the coordinating arm of the Collaborative. TDI, home to the Dartmouth Atlas Project, has more than 20 years of experience analyzing complex Medicare claims data and disseminating the findings.