The nation’s top health care officials lauded Denver Health’s patient safety and cost-cutting at what amounted to a pep rally Wednesday for the city’s public-health system, saying the hospital offers proven leadership in a key area of reform.
“They not only have found ways to cut costs, but their health results are dazzling,” said U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in an interview after the hospital tour.
The federal system is holding up Denver Health as an example to other hospital groups in a concerted effort to reduce patient harm by 40 percent and readmissions by 20 percent in the next three years.
National Medicare and Medicaid director Donald Berwick said Denver Health’s systematic pursuit of infections, mistakes and redundant testing should serve as an example to major hospitals in the federal “Partnership for Patients” program. Berwick said one in three hospital patients is harmed by something that happens during their hospital stay, and attacking that statistic will simultaneously help patients while slowing burgeoning health costs.
Medicare officials say the safety and anti-readmission effort, paid for with grants from the health care reform act, could reduce Medicare costs by $50 billion over 10 years.
Denver Health chief executive Dr. Patricia Gabow is widely credited with instilling carefully monitored protocols and standardization throughout the Denver system. The hospital was recently ranked first out of more than 100 academic hospitals in low mortality rates. Models and practices borrowed heavily from business settings have cut Denver costs by $100 million in recent years, freeing up resources to provide more than $400 million in care to the uninsured.
Denver doctors demonstrated the meticulous systems whether they intended to or not during the tour of Denver Health’s intensive-care unit. Medical director Dr. Ivor Douglas reached for sanitary hand foam on the wall before he walked into an empty room for a demonstration and directed Sebelius and Berwick to do the same. Douglas showed a copy of a simple checklist that doctors and nurses must fill out at every bedside visit to a patient on a ventilator, as part of an effort to lower ventilator-caused infections.
“We cut laboratory testing in half” with the checklists, Douglas said, by having a solid record of what care had been given and what had not.
Denver Health’s large population of uninsured or underinsured, with an urban population of homeless and other challenges, is “as tough” as found anywhere, Berwick said after the tour.
“If you can do it here, we can model it anywhere,” he said.
