Thomas W. Feeley

Characteristics of cardiac arrest in cancer patients as a predictor of survival after cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Despite advances in cardiopulmonary resuscitation and the education of its providers, survival remains dismal for cancer patients suffering in‐hospital cardiac arrest. In an effort to determine if characteristics of cardiac arrest would represent a useful parameter for prognostication and recommendations regarding the suitability of ongoing resuscitation for various groups, this review was undertaken for patients who experienced in‐hospital cardiac arrest.

Using Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing to Identify Value Improvement Opportunities in Healthcare

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY As healthcare providers cope with pricing pressures and increased accountability for performance, they should be rededicating themselves to improving the value they deliver to their patients: better outcomes and lower costs. Time‐driven activity‐based costing offers the potential for clinicians to redesign their care processes toward that end. This costing approach, however, is new to healthcare and has not yet been systematically implemented and evaluated. This article describes early time‐driven activity‐based costing work at several leading healthcare organizations in the United States and Europe. It identifies the opportunities they found to improve value for patients and demonstrates how this costing method can serve as the foundation for new bundled payment reimbursement approaches.

Ensuring quality cancer care: a follow-up review of the Institute of Medicine's 10 recommendations for improving the quality of cancer care in America.

Responding to growing concerns regarding the safety, quality, and efficacy of cancer care in the United States, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences commissioned a comprehensive review of cancer care delivery in the US health care system in the late 1990s. The National Cancer Policy Board (NCPB), a 20‐member board with broad representation, performed this review. In its review, the NCPB focused on the state of cancer care delivery at that time, its shortcomings, and ways to measure and improve the quality of cancer care. The NCPB described an ideal cancer care system in which patients would have equitable access to coordinated, guideline‐based care and novel therapies throughout the course of their disease. In 1999, the IOM published the results of this review in its influential report, Ensuring Quality Cancer Care. The report outlined 10 recommendations, which, when implemented, would: 1) improve the quality of cancer care, 2) increase the current understanding of quality cancer care, and 3) reduce or eliminate access barriers to quality cancer care. Despite the fervor generated by this report, there are lingering doubts regarding the safety and quality of cancer care in the United States today. Increased awareness of medical errors and barriers to quality care, coupled with escalating health care costs, has prompted national efforts to reform the health care system. These efforts by health care providers and policymakers should bridge the gap between the ideal state described in Ensuring Quality Cancer Care and the current state of cancer care in the United States. Cancer 2011;.

The implications of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act on cancer care delivery.

In March 2010, President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act. This legislation attempts to address cost control and improve the quality of healthcare in the United States. Cancer is a major health problem in the United States and the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 80. Therefore, cancer care providers need to be fully engaged in ongoing discussions regarding quality measurement and care delivery. With the optimum level of collaboration and support, the proposals in the legislation can be properly structured to deliver improved access to care via better delivery systems, as well as more appropriate reimbursement to advance the prevention and treatment of cancer. Cancer 2011.

The global burden of cancer

The global burden of cancer is increasing. By 2020, the global cancer burden is expected to rise by 50% owing to the increasingly elderly population. The delivery of cancer care is likely to increase the need for perioperative physicians for both operative procedures and pain management, offering new professional challenges. Specifically, these challenges will include volume and financial management, as well coordination of cancer treatment and pain management. Coordinated, team-based cancer care will be essential to ensure value-based care. Short and long-term outcome measurement is an integral part of the process.

Access to the medical record for patients and involved providers: transparency through electronic tools.

Two articles in this issue focus on providing patients and others with access to a patients electronic health information. Walker and colleagues surveyed patients and their PCPs about their attitu...

Improving Cancer Care Through Public Reporting Of Meaningful Quality Measures

Historically, quality measures for cancer have followed a different route than overall quality measures in the health care system. Many specialized cancer treatment centers were exempt from standard reporting on quality measures because of the complexity of cancer. Additionally, it has been difficult to create meaningful quality measures for cancer because the disease can strike so many different organs; is discovered at and progresses through different stages; and is treated using different modalities, such as surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Over the past decade the National Quality Forum, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bettering the quality of US health care, has endorsed measures of quality for cancer providers and patients. The Affordable Care Act of 2010, which has sections specific to cancer reporting, will also further the development and public reporting of cancer quality measures-important steps in improving the delivery of cancer care.

Measuring the value of process improvement initiatives in a preoperative assessment center using time-driven activity-based costing.

BACKGROUND The value and impact of process improvement initiatives are difficult to quantify. We describe the use of time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) in a clinical setting to quantify the value of process improvements in terms of cost, time and personnel resources. PROBLEM Difficulty in identifying and measuring the cost savings of process improvement initiatives in a Preoperative Assessment Center (PAC). GOALS Use TDABC to measure the value of process improvement initiatives that reduce the costs of performing a preoperative assessment while maintaining the quality of the assessment. STRATEGY Apply the principles of TDABC in a PAC to measure the value, from baseline, of two phases of performance improvement initiatives and determine the impact of each implementation in terms of cost, time and efficiency. RESULTS Through two rounds of performance improvements, we quantified an overall reduction in time spent by patient and personnel of 33% that resulted in a 46% reduction in the costs of providing care in the center. The performance improvements resulted in a 17% decrease in the total number of full time equivalents (FTEs) needed to staff the center and a 19% increase in the numbers of patients assessed in the center. Quality of care, as assessed by the rate of cancellations on the day of surgery, was not adversely impacted by the process improvements.

A method for defining value in healthcare using cancer care as a model.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Value‐based healthcare delivery is being discussed in a variety of healthcare forums. This concept is of great importance in the reform of the US healthcare delivery system. Defining and applying the principles of value‐based competition in healthcare delivery models will permit future evaluation of various delivery applications. However, there are relatively few examples of how to apply these principles to an existing care delivery system. In this article, we describe an approach for assessing the value created when treating cancer patients in a multidisciplinary care setting within a comprehensive cancer center. We describe the analysis of a multidisciplinary care center that treats head and neck cancers, and we attempt to examine how this center integrates with Porter and Teisbergs (2006) concept of value‐based competition based on the results analysis. Using the relationship between outcomes and costs as the definition of value, we developed a methodology to analyze proposed outcomes for a population of patients treated using a multidisciplinary approach, and we matched those outcomes to the costs of the care provided. We present this work as a model for defining value for a subset of patients undergoing active treatment. The method can be applied not only to head and neck treatments, but to other modalities as well. Public reporting of this type of data for a variety of conditions can lead to improved competition in the healthcare marketplace and, as a result, improve outcomes and decrease health expenditures.

Second-opinion pathologic review is a patient safety mechanism that helps reduce error and decrease waste.

PURPOSE We have a crisis in health care delivery, originating from increasing health care costs and inconsistent quality-of-care measures. During the past several years, value-based health care delivery has gained increasing attention as an approach to control costs and improve quality. One proven way to control costs and improve the quality of health care is subspecialty pathologic review of patients with cancer before initiation of therapy. Our study examined the diagnostic error rate among patients with cancer treated at a tertiary care hospital and demonstrated the value of subspecialty pathologic review before initiation of treatment. METHODS From September 1 to September 30, 2011, all patients seeking a clinical consultation had pathology submitted to and reviewed by a pathologist with subspecialty expertise and correlated in our pathology database. RESULTS A total of 2,718 patient cases were reviewed during September 2011. There was agreement between the original pathologist and our departmental subspecialty pathologist in 75% of cases. In 25% of cases, there was a discrepancy between the original pathology report and the subspecialty final pathology report; 509 changes in diagnosis were minor discrepancies (18.7%), and in 6.2% of patients (169 reports), the change in diagnosis represented a major discrepancy that potentially affected patient care. CONCLUSION Second review of a patients outside pathology by a subspecialist pathologist demonstrates the value of multidisciplinary cancer care in a high-volume comprehensive cancer center. The second review improves clinical outcomes by providing patients with evidence-based treatment plans for their precise pathologic diagnoses.