Roughly 11% of the estimated 36 million hospitalization visits per year could have been avoided, meaning millions of dollars that could have been saved. However, determining when a patient needs to be admitted and more importantly, when they should return for additional check-ups can certainly be a difficult task for the patient to decide on their own. CEO and Founder of Loopback Analytics, Neil Smiley says there are key ways hospitals can save money without hurting a patients’ quality of care. The biggest savings would be the result of public policy changes for data and payment policy.
Here’s the 5 tips:
1. Increase public access to claims data – Medicare, Medicaid and other large payers should expand access to de-identified claims data for analysis to help provider organizations with cost accountability and enable measurement of improvement initiatives
2. Pricing Transparency – Consumers and providers are unable to make informed decisions if they don’t know the costs. Pricing transparency would result in price competition and more informed buying decisions.
3. Align financial incentives across provider care settings – Mismatch of incentive alignment across care settings results in local optimization of reimbursement for individual care silos with higher overall episode costs.
4. Focus factories that specialize in high volume procedures – Providers that perform the same procedure in high volume often have higher quality and lower costs than providers that do lower volumes in the same procedure
5. Expand Use of Digital Health – Data from smart phones and wearable devices have an opportunity to move us from “sick care” to “health care” by providing better early warning of symptoms and a better feedback loop for lifestyle decisions that impact outcomes.
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