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The Business of
Health Care Report U.S. health care is generally respected as the best in the world. Yet consumers and members of the health industry know it can be better. A group of Fortune 500 Companies has formed a bold coalition to improve safety and overall value of health care to Americans. It's called LeapFrog, a name symbolizing hopes for immediate and significant strides in quality. The concept is to mobilize employer purchasing power to steer patients to preferred facilities making breakthrough improvements in safety and care. LeapFrog is sponsored by The Business Roundtable and announced its implementation plan in November 2000. Three initial methods to improve patient safety head the list, many of which pose challenges for the health care industry. First is computer physician order entry. Because electronic order entries can eliminate misreading or misinterpretation as occurs with handwritten instructions, they have been shown to reduce prescribing errors by more than fifty percent. Yet fewer than five percent of hospitals use electronic order systems. The second category is termed "evidence-based medicine." As providers and watchdog groups scramble to develop guidelines for hard data to demonstrate quality, LeapFrog proposes another indicator of quality now. In summary, research shows that the more surgeries of a high-risk nature hospitals and physicians perform, the better their performance and the higher the survival odds for the patient. So LeapFrog wants to steer patients to surgical programs performing higher volumes of selected procedures. The third area of focus is on staffing in intensive care units of hospitals. LeapFrog calls for specialists with credentials in critical care medicine to respond to 95 percent of emergency pages within 5 minutes...getting to a critical patient quickly. With this standard, the risk of patients dying in the ICU has been shown to reduce by more than 10 percent. If you have comments on health care or suggestions for topics to be addressed on this program, e-mail me at DouglasHawthorne@TexasHealth.org. Stay tuned to our weekly Business of Health Care reports here on TexasHealth.org and on News Radio 1080 KRLD. Doug Hawthorne - DougHawthorne@TexasHealth.org ©
2001 Texas Health Resources |
