Michigan hospitals reduced surgical complications by nearly 10 percent at a time when the rest of the nation saw no change in complication rates, according to a new study out this week in the Archives of Surgery.
Complications dropped at hospitals participating the Michigan Surgical Quality Collaborative, a group of 16 hospitals led by the U-M Health System that agreed to pool data and share information about what keeps patients safe.
The fewer patients suffering ventilator-associated pneumonias alone, among the 300,000 surgical patients studied, could save $13 million a year.
The backdrop of President Obama’s vision for health care reform is improving quality and reducing costs, two ideas that seem to conflict. But the collaborative strategy could quicken the pace of reaching those goals.
“The collaboration of hospitals in terms of identifying and disseminating information about best practices is actually a much more effective way of improving quality than just relying on each hospital alone to come up with what they think is a way to improve quality,” says study author Dr. Darrell Campbell Jr., professor of surgery and chief medical officer at UMHS.
“In other words, sharing ideas is important and it’s effective,” he says.
Additional U-M authors are Dr. Michael Englesbe, James Kubus and Laurel Phillips, all of the Department of Surgery.
