Today I was introduced to the Puget Sound Heath Alliance and was really fascinated by the work they are doing. This is a nonpartisan, not for profit organization focused on improving healthcare in our region. They focus on the need to improve the business of healthcare, emphasizing the fact that hospitals have grown up with minimal accountability from a business standpoint. They don't have a good understanding of their own costs and therefore, cannot clearly define success from a financial standpoint. One example that was shown looked at 10 of the top hospitals across the country and compared average costs for patients in their last two years of life. The overall costs ranged from a high of $106,000 to $55,000; a huge discrepancy across programs that are all considered "best" in the nation. As for our region, the Health Alliance has obtained information from health clinics and hospitals throughout the region to compare their performance on against standard metrics. The report can be found at www.wacommunitycheckup.org -- and it is a HUGE report. Fortunately, they recognize the need for this information to be available and usable by the public and in September 2008, it will become an interactive website that will allow users to drill down to details showing how well hospitals perform against one another. It is intended to be a public resource enabling consumers to make educated decisions based on actual performance and facts.
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