Care delivery excellence: Improving patient care and the bottom line

As patients have more choices than ever regarding how and where they receive care, providers’ success depends on delivering high-quality, efficient healthcare.

Dr. Aman Sabharwal, managing principal of consulting at Vizient, shares the key components of care delivery excellence and how providers can evolve their care journey while improving financial sustainability.

Why is care delivery excellence so important for leaders to focus on?

Quality is heavily dependent on care delivery excellence— everything from capacity and throughput to perioperative and surgical solutions to optimizing cost and outcomes. It's all about improving efficiencies to provide safe, effective, equitable and patient-centered care while elevating the health system's public perception. Most commercial health plans hold hospitals accountable for poor quality outcomes. To maximize reimbursement from different value-based payment arrangements, organizations must prioritize delivering quality care.

How can organizations bolster their organization’s financial health?

To achieve financial sustainability, leaders must take a comprehensive approach to improving their operational deficiencies. Additionally, ensuring accurate documentation and coding in the inpatient setting and emergency department are key, but also in the ambulatory setting for capturing hierarchical condition categories to accurately reflect risk adjustment factor scoring to measure more appropriately a patient’s complexity. Also, by improving operating room throughput and decreasing case cancellations, organizations can maximize their procedural volumes. Having a well thought out ambulatory surgery center strategy offers enhanced financial benefits and improved patient convenience.

How can providers promote their workforce resiliency?

It’s important to leverage “top of license” practices in primary care with advanced practice providers (APPs). By empowering APPs, providers can expand access to care, improve patient satisfaction and staff burnout. Organizations also should focus on recruiting and retaining nursing staff. Building partnerships with universities can help establish a pipeline of qualified nurses while implementing transition-to-practice programs, such as the Vizient/AACN Nurse Residency Program, which have been shown to reduce turnover. Staff professional development helps promote morale and overall workforce efficiency.

Why are healthcare organizations focused on improving their quality scores?

Patients are savvier than ever before and consider hospital scores, rankings and physician ratings when deciding on their healthcare. As a result, health systems are laser-focused on improving outcomes to be a top performer and optimize their reputation through public rankings. To do so, systems must have a platform to benchmark and report data in real time. Having a source of truth allows for actionable interventions. Also, fostering a culture of high reliability and safety is foundational to sustaining improvements, along with the tactical activities of improving clinical care. For example, mortality can be impacted by both the observed outcomes through improving what happens at the bedside (transfer center practices, mortality review process, use of hospice and palliative care, and sepsis management), and the expected outcomes through improving documentation and coding.

How is Vizient partnering with healthcare leaders in their care delivery excellence journey?

Vizient partners with healthcare leaders and systems to navigate the clinical and operational complexities of today’s environment while delivering the highest quality care. Whether it’s improving patient flow, decreasing length of stay, or ensuring providers are working at the top of their license, we provide expertise and unique data insights to help develop strategies to fuel improvement. This includes improving patient outcomes and rankings as a high-reliability organization as well as strengthening financial performance through tactics for enhanced margin performance and maximized revenue.

To learn more, visit vizientinc.com/caredelivery