These recommendations are to improve health care quality and
safety. According to Helen Darling, president of NBGH, “There is an urgent need to protect patients and the lack of meaningful progress in improving safety and quality in the U.S. health system is frustrating to employers who can no longer afford to sustain rising and uncontrollable health care costs.” Here are the three recommendations:
- The first recommendation urges employers to stop paying for the most significant “never events” identified by the National Quality Forum. These include surgical events, such as wrong surgical procedures being performed, and care management events such as medication errors resulting in a patient’s death or being seriously disabled.
- The second recommendation, based on years of strong evidence from prestigious groups such as the Institute of Medicine and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, urges employers to require that the hospitals and health care systems in their preferred networks have top level Board and staff leadership unequivocally committed to a “culture of safety” to make improving health care safety and quality the highest priority. Employers should require them to actively participate in two ongoing projects – the 100,000 Lives Campaign, a program launched by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement to avoid unnecessary deaths in U.S. hospitals, and the Surgical Care Improvement Project, whose goals are to reduce the incidence of surgical complications and mortality by 25 percent by the year 2010.
- The final recommendation calls on employers to require that the hospitals and health care systems in their preferred networks implement health information technology, including electronic medical records and personal health records for all patients. The technology must meet the standards and requirements specified by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, based on the work of the American Health Information Community. Additionally, the technology systems should be designed to include e-prescribing, and connections to the personal health records that every consumer will have and be able to carry.
NBGH has also published a white paper on “its comprehensive position on reforming the U.S. health care system” that is available at www.businessgrouphealth.org.
