It’s no secret that health care costs in the U.S. are out of control. Households have been spending more and more of their budgets on health care. So have employers. That’s why efforts are underway in Washington to change the system. Internally, some hospitals, including in the Milwaukee area, have been working to reduce costs by becoming more efficient. As WUWM’s LaToya Dennis reports, those changes could mean shorter stays for patients.
Imagine this: You wake up not feeling well, and as the day drags on, you start to feel even worse. By the end of day two, you’ve had enough, so you head to the hospital. You end up having pneumonia and you’re admitted. According to the Centers for Disease Control, you’ll be there nearly five days; that’s the average length of a hospital stay in the U.S. And five days can rack up big bills. Enter Jeff Terry with GE Healthcare.
“I’m a Managing Principal for Clinical Excellence,” Terry says.
Simply put, Terry works with hospitals across the country to lessen the time patients spend there, while not jeopardizing quality. He says the statistic most commonly cited, is that there is $700 billion of waste in the health care industry every year.
“I would say most of it is waste, meaning that the system is less efficient than it should be, which is actually an extraordinarily-complicated problem,” Terry says.
Yet Terry says some solutions are relatively simple. For example, moving up patient discharge times from 3 p.m. to 11 a.m. can free up space for others.
“Patients who are in the emergency room that morning are able to get upstairs and begin their treatment effectively a day earlier than they otherwise would. Which, when you start taking days off of patient’s stay in a hospital, that’s an enormous cost savings,” Terry says.
One of the hospitals Terry has worked with is Milwaukee-based Aurora Health Care. Patrick Falvey is senior vice president. “We had a leadership team that came together and took a look at the data that we had in terms of length of stay,” Falvey says.
Falvey says the consensus was that Aurora could do better. So around five years ago, it made changes to move patients out of the hospital faster.
“With the discharge plan process, which is when you start working with a patient to getting them prepared to leave the hospital, that normally starts near the end of their stay. So what we started to do was, as we were admitting folks, and within the first day of stay, we started to have the conversation about discharge planning,” Falvey says.
Falvey says planning ahead can reduce problems that sometimes arise in the end, forcing patients to stay in the hospital longer. For example, the lack of proper medical equipment at home or no one to help with daily tasks. The result of the changes at Aurora…
“Within the first six months of 2009, which is the last data set that I have, we’d be expected to have a length of stay of about 4.6 days and we’re running closer to 3.8 days,” Falvey says.
Falvey says the system is now able to deliver quality care for less money, because it’s getting patients out the door faster. One group that advocates for patients is the Empowered Patient Coalition based in California. Julia Hallisy is president.
“It used to be that we liked to have patients stay extra days. We liked to observe them, we like to have them get their strength back,” Hallisy says.
Hallisy says those days are gone. She says while patients may already feel as though they’re being kicked out of hospitals too soon, it may actually be better for them.
“Unfortunately, hospitals can be risky places for patients. The longer they stay, the greater the risk of things like infections and falls. So I think across the board, most people would agree that as soon as the patient is medically able, it’s usually a good idea for them to leave the hospital,” Hallisy says.
As long as earlier releases are not to the detriment of patients, Hallisy cautions. Her group’s acceptance of shorter hospital stays is welcomed news for Steve Brenton, president of the Wisconsin Hospital Association, because he predicts the trend will continue.
“I think organizations realize that their revenue streams will be not increasing at the levels they have historically. And that means to remain financially viable, you have to be lean and mean on the expense side,” Brenton says.
Brenton says for years, local hospitals have been working to reduce costs for themselves and patients. He says while health care in metro Milwaukee is still higher than the national average, things are headed in the right direction even before Washington wanted in on the conversation.
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