Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) have asked the Government Accountability Office to study best practices used by states, hospitals and other countries to reduce healthcare costs and improve quality.
The senators' letter asks the GAO to identify best practices in healthcare delivery and determine the extent to which they could be applied nationwide.
"If we as a society fail to control healthcare costs, there will be a detrimental effect on our nation's economy and standard of living," the senators wrote. "To improve value in healthcare spending, we must balance our need to control costs with the need to maintain quality of care."
In their letter to Gene Dodaro, acting Comptroller General of the United States, Conrad and Whitehouse say healthcare spending has been growing faster than the economy as a whole - about 2.5 percent more per year since the 1960s.
This year, Americans will likely spend $2.4 trillion on healthcare, and they're expected to spend $4.3 trillion by 2017. In the next decade, healthcare spending is projected to consume 20 percent of the gross domestic product. Medicare's liability alone is estimated at $36 trillion.
Conrad and Whitehouse said efforts are underway in many states to generate savings through simple improvements in the quality of healthcare delivery. They pointed out that Michigan's Keystone Project, which sought to reduce hospital-acquired infections and other complications in intensive care units, saved 1,578 lives and more than $165 million in a 15-month span between March 2004 and June 2005.
The senators noted a similar project spearheaded by the Rhode Island Quality Institute, an organization Whitehouse founded. Infections in patients with catheters decreased 36 percent from the first quarter of 2006 to the fourth quarter, and 11 out of 23 participating ICUs had zero infections for 12 months.
In the letter, Conrad and Whitehouse also called for:
- focusing more on improving health outcomes and on increasing prevention and wellness;
- reducing unnecessary use of healthcare and increase efficiencies in the system, both without reducing quality;
- revising incentives that reward quantity instead of quality and efficiency;
- studying the development and diffusion of healthcare technology and discourage defensive medicine;
- and finding ways to provide better information to both consumers and providers of care and thoroughly explore all potential areas of reducing healthcare expenditures.