For the last 10 years, the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers (CCHP), in Camden, N.J., has worked with local healthcare providers, hospitals and physician practices to improve quality, care coordination and costs by focusing on what the organization calls "superusers" and the high-cost "hot spots" in the city.
During the Maine Hospital Association's 2013 Small or Rural Hospital Conference last week in Newry, Maine, Jeffrey Brenner, medical director of the Urban Health Institute at Cooper University Healthcare and executive director of CCHP, talked about how CCHP has been able to bend the cost curve by reducing the amount of emergency department use and inpatient stays among Camden residents.
While Brenner did not provide details on financials, he did explain what CCHP has been doing to reduce costs and improve care coordination. And data is at the core of CCHP's efforts.
Brenner explained to the audience that after working for several years to gain access to hospital claims data all three Camden health systems (Cooper University Hospital, Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center,and Virtua Health), CCHP compiled a comprehensive database to analyze and quantify the utilization of the hospitals by Camden residents.
Using discrete patient-level claims data, it was found that in one year, nearly half of the city's residents visited a city ED or hospital and the most common diagnoses for visits were head colds, viral infections, ear infections and sore throats.
"In Camden, our ERs were occupied with a lot of issues that don't need to be there, like head colds and ear infections," Brenner said.
In Camden, 80 percent of the costs were spent on 13 percent of the patients, and 90 percent of the costs were spent on 20 percent of the patients. Brenner called these patients the "superusers" of the healthcare system.
Using the information gleaned from the patient-level claims data and the relationships it had built across the Camden healthcare provider community, including community-based private practices, hospital staff and social workers across the city, CCHP began operating several health project initiatives to demonstrate a collaborative approach to improving care delivery and patient outcomes. The projects focus on the high-cost "hot spots" in the city.
CCHP has also expanded its partner base by building relationships with executive leadership of hospitals, social service/public health agencies, state government agencies, leaders at the statewide Medicaid health plans and policymakers to advocate and create legislation to sustain the organization's approach to healthcare delivery.
Despite the strides CCHP has made, no single healthcare organization has enough resources to solve an entire citywide problem, Brenner noted.