Business consortium to launch effort seeking higher standards at hospitals Leapfrog Group will develop cost-effective policies
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11/15/00 3:26 pm
Msg: 50618 of 50638
Business consortium to launch effort seeking higher standards at hospitals Leapfrog Group will develop cost-effective policies
Nov. 15 — A group of the nation’s largest
companies expects to unveil Wednesday an
ambitious effort to force hospitals to
substantially reduce medical errors, a move the
companies hope will save lives and money
THE GROUP’S 60 corporate members — including
General Electric Co., General Motors Corp., Delta Air Lines Inc., AT&T Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Boeing Co. and Xerox Corp. — plan to use their mammoth health-care-buying power to press for stringent
new safety standards at U.S. hospitals.
Together, these companies provide health
benefits to more than 20million people and spend more than $40 billion on health care annually. The companies intend to begin steering their employees to hospitals that invest in computerized prescription systems, employ specialized doctors in intensive-care units and perform higher volumes of certain medical procedures.
The Business Roundtable, an association of corporate CEOs, is sponsoring a new consortium of large employers, called the Leapfrog Group, that is focusing on developing new cost-effective health-benefit policies. The group’s name refers to the companies’ efforts to get employees to “leap forward” in their efforts to make use of high-quality providers, an official for the group said. “We feel confident in our ability to make a difference
by harnessing and leveraging our health-care purchasing power,” Mr. Campbell said. “It’s a straightforward business approach to tackling a complex problem.” The Leapfrog Group plans to announce its initiative in Washington Wednesday.
The group was formed earlier this year to
respond to a disturbing government report last
year that found that medical mistakes at
hospitals result in between 44,000 and 98,000 deaths a year and produce more than $20 billion in added costs. Leapfrog officials also intend to release a study Wednesday that shows that if hospitals were to follow its tougher guidelines, 58,300 lives would be saved and 522,000 medication errors would be prevented
annually. Very few U.S. hospitals meet the guidelines now, Leapfrog officials say.
Millions of employees of these major companies will be getting information about hospitals that they likely never knew before. The participating companies intend to educate
workers about the fact that not all hospitals provide the same level of care.
The American Hospital Association, however, says its members have already been working toward improving patient safety, even before the government’s report on medical errors. The Leapfrog Group’s guidelines “are ideas that have shown some potential promise in improving safety, but they are also very new concepts that are still in their infancy,” says Carmela Coyle, senior vice president at the Chicago -based hospital organization. She notes that sometimes introducing new technology can produce additional errors. “These are three and only three ideas among a wide range of things that can be done,” says Ms. Coyle, adding that “it may be early to begin steering patients.” Ms. Coyle says hospitals’ plights are complicated by government reimbursement cuts several years ago that squeezed hospitals and have made spending on new programs quite difficult.
Leapfrog officials said they want hospitals to install so-called “computer physician order entry” systems, where physicians enter medication orders via computers linked to prescribing-error prevention software. Leapfrog said that such systems — which cut out handwriting errors or flag drug interactions — have been shown to reduce serious prescribing errors in hospitals by more than 50 percent, yet less than 2 percent of hospitals meet the standard today. Leapfrog also said it plans to encourage employees to have complicated medical procedures performed at hospitals offering the best survival odds, based in part on the number of procedures a particular hospital performs
annually. |
