Premier Releases Efficiency Dashboard

In an age of tighter hospital budgets and policy pressures, the Charlotte, N.C.-based Premier healthcare alliance has created an efficiency dashboard and reporting mechanism to identify 15 different categories of potential savings opportunities in hospitals.

“The goal here was really to create a roadmap so that health systems could identify first the opportunities for savings and then go after them,” said Susan DeVore, Premier president and CEO, in a telephonic press briefing on April 10. “We think this is a first of a kind, focused efficiency and waste dashboard.”

The dashboard analyzes hospitals with opportunities for savings improvement. Of those, Premier has calculated the average amount of savings that could be generated each year by a typical 200- to 300-bed community hospital. Through this process, the dashboard has identified the following five areas with the biggest opportunity for average annual savings per hospital:

1. Unnecessary labor expense, such as inefficient processes that take too long or require too many employees to complete: $6.18 million per hospital per year, and up to 5.1 percent of a hospital’s total labor budget;
2. Excess readmissions: $3.83 million per hospital, per year, and up to 9.6 percent of a hospital’s budget;  
3. Inappropriate length of stay: $2.63 million per hospital per year, and up to 5.4 percent of the hospital’s budget;  
4. Skill-mix dollar variance that occurs when higher paid employees do work that less expensive or less experienced staff could do equally well: $2.38 million per hospital per year, and up to 6.2 percent of a hospital’s total labor budget; and
5. Unnecessary lab testing such as blood, urine or hemoglobin tests: $2.23 million per hospital per year, and up to 1.6 percent of a hospital’s total lab budget.

Devore described the dashboard as pulling “from a labor productivity database, a supply chain database, and a clinical database [to] identify 15 areas that we thought going in, based on the mining of our data, were the usual suspects for opportunities to improve efficiencies.” The system then creates a report and buckets efficiencies into four buckets: quality indicators, including length of stay and readmissions; supply chain indicators, like contracts compliance and drug expenses; utilization indicators like blood levels and amounts of diagnostic exams and labs; and labor indicators, including levels of staffing and overtime.

Focusing on Readmissions
Guided by these findings, Premier conducted a follow-up analysis to determine certain drivers of spend. Focused first on readmissions, an analysis of 5.8 million discharges found that the following diagnoses have the highest average percent of readmitted cases and additional costs per case (July 2010-June 2011):

• Circulatory system (heart attack/heart failure)–17 percent readmission rate, $15,517 additional cost per case;
• Respiratory system (pneumonia, asthma, chronic bronchitis)–12 percent readmission rate, $12,146 additional cost per case;
• Musculoskeletal system (major joint replacement, spinal fusion)–9 percent readmission rate, $17,730 additional cost per case.

The efficiency dashboard is customized by hospital to give the most information possible. Using hospital data pulled from Premier’s comparative clinical, operations and purchasing database, a benchmark is set based on top quartile performance. The hospitals receive quarterly reports showing areas where their organization falls below the benchmark, and the magnitude of potential savings. Measures are tracked over time to show where progress has been made quarter to quarter. The measures are being continually assessed and expanded to help zero in on further opportunities for savings.

In addition to the top five categories of average annual savings, the dashboard measures 10 additional areas. For these categories, the average annual savings, per hospital are: