Hospitals will pay a lot if core standards are added
Vendors have no choice but to pass on costs
March 31 is your deadline for submitting third-quarter 1998 ORYX data. Those data have to be submitted through your hospital’s chosen Joint Commission-approved performance measurement system vendor. "There are a lot of hospitals, with a lot of measures, using a lot of vendors nationwide," says Becky Miller, director of performance measurement and quality at the Missouri Hospital Associa tion. "Without experience under their belt, now the Joint Commission is considering taking off on another initiative."
"It appeared that any vendor who wanted to play the game got to play," says Patrice Spath, ART, a health care consultant in Forest Grove, OR, and Hospital Peer Review’s consulting editor. Now the Joint Commission has a morass of data coming in, say Miller and Spath, and every hospital is using a different vendor with different data elements and different measures. "The goals of the ORYX project will be difficult to achieve with such a variety of systems and measurements," continues Spath. "By specifying 12 focus areas, I think the commission is trying to put some validity and quality control back into the project. Perhaps the ORYX project should have concentrated on these topics from the very beginning."
Hospital Peer Review asked a representative of a leading ORYX vendor how a change in the initiative might affect her company’s operations. Nell Wood is director of marketing and communication at the Quality Indicator Project, operated by the Maryland Hospital Association in Baltimore, a performance measurement system with 1,800 participants around the country, 1,100 of which are acute care hospitals.
Hospitals collect data according to the project’s definition and use tools provided by the project to transmit data to the project. If a hospital wants to use its data for ORYX-related purposes, the project then passes the data on to the Joint Commission. Some hospitals simply collect data for their own performance improvement projects, not to satisfy Joint Commission requirements.
"It’s impossible to predict how much of a burden this will represent," says Wood, "and anyway, at this point, I’d be speculating because we don’t know what’s going to happen with the ORYX initiative. If ORYX were to evolve to a point where there were core measures that everybody had to use, and if the core measures were completely new and different, of course extra resources would be required to embed them into our system. All vendors would incur those costs to upgrade their systems."
Presumably, she says, the core measures will reflect the interests and abilities of the hospitals, in which case, most vendors’ programs would likely have at least some of the measures already embedded.
"There’s no getting away from the fact that it would place a resource burden on vendors to embed the new measures in their programs," says Wood. "And, as is the nature of any business, any time you’re incurring additional cost, you need to recoup those costs, and the way you do that is by having the ultimate price to the user reflect them."
Bottom line: This will cost you money.
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