Dive Brief:
- The University of Utah has created a tool that will tell leaders how much it costs the hospital system to care for each patient admitted.
- Senior vice president for health sciences Vivian Lee brought together a team of professionals from different areas, including IT, data warehousing and the medical group, to create a tool pulling data from various departments.
- The program tracks costs for all of a hospital's patients, allowing the information to then be shared with clinicians to find cost-reduction strategies.
Dive Insight:
With no end in sight to healthcare spending increases, payers are going to put even more pressure on providers to cut costs. With many provider efforts generating limited results, they're under the gun to come up with more effective strategies. Initiatives like this one, however, show some promise. Not only can it help identify cost issues—and save patients from needless, sometimes harmful care—the system is also using the data tool to measure quality of care and effective treatment patterns. Not every hospital has the resources to develop data tools of this kind, but those who do are likely to follow in the University of Utah's footsteps if they haven't already.