Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt has launched another piece of the Bush administration’s value-driven healthcare plan to expand transparency in cost and quality of care to consumers.
At a meeting of Pacific Northwest business and healthcare leaders last week, Leavitt announced that the not-for-profit Puget Sound Health Alliance will be the first in a national network of local organizations that will have access to Medicare data for reporting care and cost outcomes to the public.
The Puget Sound Health Alliance is the first organization Leavitt has designated a “Community Leader for Value-Driven Health Care.” This distinction is the first step toward gaining access to Medicare data for public comparison of healthcare providers, said Diane Giese, a Health Alliance spokesperson.
The Health Alliance grew out of a task force in King County, a region that includes 39 cities, including Seattle. Headed by Ron Sims, executive of King County and chair of the Health Alliance, the King County Health Reform Initiative has worked to control employee health costs and encourage healthy decisions through preventative measures, such as a volunteer consumer health report.
Providers, payers, employers and other industry stakeholders now are participating in the Puget Sound Health Alliance, which is in its second year. “The idea was that we would cease to argue,” Sims said. “We had looked around the country and seen the various models in which everyone wanted to dominate but nobody wanted solutions.”
Leavitt lauded the efforts of the Health Alliance, whose nearly 130 participants have agreed to identify and measure quality healthcare, then produce publicly available comparison reports designed for use in healthcare decision-making. “All healthcare is local, and we need cooperative local action just as we need common national goals,” Leavitt said.
As one of the participating health systems, GroupHealth Cooperative shares the alliance’s goal of improving quality care by lowering overall medical costs, said GroupHealth Medical Director Hugh Straley, MD.
“We’re very interested in assuring that the medical care industry in our region is efficient and that the processes we use work towards improving quality outcomes for patients,” said Straley, who also serves as vice chair of the board for the Health Alliance. “When that happens, the medical cost trends will be lower.”
Straley also noted that cost standardization is a long-term goal of the Health Alliance, which Sims said is moving towards a pay-for-performance model of some kind.
The Health Alliance plans on releasing a composite report of healthcare outcomes to the public some time this year.
In conjunction with the HHS announcement, Washington Governor Christine Gregoire said she will call for $2 million in state funding to help the Health Alliance expand its public reporting and quality improvement work statewide.
Sims said the Health Alliance now is looking to the national healthcare system to make measurable standards of performance. “We in turn will reward quality performance; we will not pay for mediocrity,” he promised. “Right now, healthcare pays the same for both.”