When NEA Baptist decided to analyze costs behind the hospital’s cardiac surgery program, an unlikely “odd couple” partnered to lead the charge. Dr. Paul Levy, Director of Surgical Services, and hospital Chief Financial Officer Kyle Sanders teamed up to lead the effort.
“Having a doctor and CFO partnership is an odd couple but is essential to effect medical change because Kyle doesn’t speak ‘physician,’” Dr. Levy said.
Employing the Baptist Management System to improve the value of the hospital’s cardiac surgery program, the pair envisioned enhancing the quality to earn three stars – the highest score possible – from the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, and to become the lowest cost cardiac surgical services in the region within three to five years.
The first challenge, however, came when trying to identify and grasp the real production costs.
“There wasn’t a lot of clarity in the data,” Kyle said. “In fact, this initiative started by trying to make the data easier to understand.”
The pair spent a year and a half developing a turn-key, diagnosis-related group (DRG)-specific model to make it easier for everyone to understand their production costs. The final version, Production Cost & Revenue Tool (PC&R), is a user-friendly, reproducible tool that can be employed by stakeholders to get a better understanding of “actionable” production costs, length of stay, and severity of illness. PC&R also:
- Standardized the way the hospital attributed patients’ production costs and captured patients’ severity of illness.
- Educated stakeholders about these production costs
- Provided stakeholder feedback about correctly capturing patient severity of illness (CMI vs. Cost).
- Used Baptist OneCare® “smart lists” as a real-time cue during patient evaluation (“risk-adjust”).
While change didn’t come readily with stakeholders, once the first production costs became evident, the team’s vested interest grew.
To date, The PC&R tool has helped NEA Baptist’s cardiac surgery program become Medicare profitable and realize lowest-cost provider status in the Baptist system. NEA cardiac surgery production costs were reduced by $10,000 per case during the last two years (more than $1 million last year). Also, they have fully utilized Baptist OneCare® “smart lists” to appropriately “risk-adjust” patients. NEA has applied the PC&R tool to other hospital service lines—lumbar fusions, cholecystectomies, knee replacements, colectomies—during the past year.
“What we are missing in health care is collaboration across departmental silos,” Dr. Levy said. “This was an untapped opportunity; once we clarified goals and started to work together, the project developed legs.”
Interested in learning more about Baptist Management Systems? Contact Skip Steward at skip.steward@bmhcc.org.