This is not a blog on healthcare, but as regular readers know, I post periodically on healthcare cost issues because they are a major headache these days for labor relations and human resource management. So here are three recent items:
From Kaisernetwork.org: “Small Business Groups To Push Senate on Association Health Plan Legislation”
The National Federation of Independent Business and 160 other organizations . . . began a campaign pushing for the passage of a bill . . . that would allow small businesses to band together across state lines to form association health plans . . . . Under the legislation, AHPs would be exempt from states’ minimum coverage requirements and subject only to federal coverage standards.
Supporters of AHPs contend that they would decrease administrative costs and allow small businesses to negotiate better rates with insurers . . . .
AHPs face “staunch opposition” from insurers, state government agencies and some small businesses, who contend that AHPs will attract healthier employees, increasing costs for businesses that continue to offer state-regulated plans. Read more (article has a few links to newspaper stories)
Next, The Wall Street Journal (Bernard Wysocki Jr) (here at SFGate.com) reports: “To fix health care, hospitals take tips from Toyota”
In the factories of Toyota Motor Corp., any worker who spots a serious problem can pull a cord and stop the assembly line. Richard Shannon, chairman of medicine at Allegheny General Hospital, is applying the Toyota technique to an intensive-care unit here. . . .
Similar things are happening in at least a dozen hospitals across the country. The Toyota system emphasizes the smoothest possible flow of work — accomplished by, say, mapping out work processes and eliminating unnecessary steps, and using teamwork to identify and fix problems as soon as they crop up. Hospitals are using the tactics to reduce patient waiting times, slash wheelchair inventories, prepare operating rooms faster and move patients through a hospital stay or doctor visit quickly, seamlessly and error free. . . .
The techniques have taken a roundabout path to reach the hospitals. . . . Taught in business schools and promoted by consultants, variations became the rage among U.S. manufacturers . . . after Toyota had become the envy of the manufacturing world.
Now, some U.S. manufacturers are pushing the Toyota approach from factory floor to hospital ward, as part of their continuing effort to hold down rising employee health-care costs. . . .
Hospitals aren’t factories, though. Doctors, nurses and other hospital staffers don’t think of themselves as assembly-line workers or their patients as anything resembling a Camry under construction. . . . . To ease the potential culture clash, many hospitals play down the Toyota name. But the conflict between the culture of efficiency and the culture of caring is never far from the surface. . . .
To executives steeped in the lean values of the Toyota system, hospitals seem full of waste. “In the pharmacy, for example, do we need that much inventory?” . . .
[A]t a clinic . . . , the dozen staffers were trying to cut a typical 61-minute office visit, as well as staff overtime, by 50 percent. They produced a 25-foot wall map charting a pneumonia patient’s typical office visit. With help from the consultants, they concluded that 17 steps are valuable and 51 aren’t. In the latter category, for instance, patients walk to a separate laboratory to get blood drawn. . . .
Doctors were among the most skeptical. They “don’t want to be told how to do things,” . . . . Read more
Anyone who has ever cooled their heels in a dr’s office for an hour, waiting for 3 minutes with the doctor and 2 with a nurse, knows that simple but massive inefficiencies exist. No doubt subtler ones do as well. Let’s hope this trend spreads.
But as my third piece shows, the medical profession is right up there with the legal one in resistance to change. New York Times has an in-depth story entitled: “Many Hospitals Resist Computerized Patient Care” (By Milt Freudenheim) (abstract only; reprint available for $2.95)
Sphere: Related ContentOnly few dozen medical centers across country are making full use of latest computerized patient safety systems despite pressure from large employers, unions and health care advocacy groups; many hospitals and doctors doubt that computerized systems will ever repay their mulit-million-dollar costs; fear current technology will be outmoded or cost much less in few years; many doctors complain that using systems to write prescriptions and order tests takes away from seeing patients and running their offices on already stressful workdays
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing.
Subscribe by RSS
Subscribe by Email
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment