Partners Like This We Don't Need

The latest iteration of the forward thinking health care spinmeisters in the Obama White House is Partnership for Patients: Better Care, Lower Costs.  This will allegedly improve the quality, safety, and affordability of health care for all Americans  -- all in one fell swoop.  If you have any doubts about the integrity of this initative, then you are a reasonable person.  If you think this makes any sense, then consider the following statistics generated by the same people who designed this ambitious public-private partnership model.

• Keep patients from getting injured or sicker. By the end of 2013, preventable hospital-acquired conditions would decrease by 40% compared to 2010. Achieving this goal would mean approximately 1.8 million fewer injuries to patients with more than 60,000 lives saved over three years. 

Where do they come up with these numbers?  Off the tops of their heads?  60,000 lives saved?  What baseline would they be working off of?  The 12 year-old "To Err Is Human" report?

• Help patients heal without complication. By the end of 2013, preventable complications during a transition from one care setting to another would be decreased so that all hospital readmissions would be reduced by 20% compared to 2010. Achieving this goal would mean more than 1.6 million patients would recover from illness without suffering a preventable complication requiring re-hospitalization within 30 days of discharge.

Now I get it.  So this initiative will address one of the key components, in the eyes of the Health Care Reform Act authors, of rising health care costs -- hospital readmissions.  Did it ever occur to these spinmeisters that accurately gathering and reporting this kind of data is impossible in the current environment?  That any data gathering and reporting around this would be so onerous and compromised that it would render any such pursuits impractical and meaningless?

• Achieving these goals will save lives and prevent injuries to millions of Americans, and has the potential to save up to $35 billion dollars across the health care system, including up to $10 billion in Medicare savings, over the next three years. Over the next ten years, it could reduce costs to Medicare by about $50 billion and result in billions more in Medicaid savings. 

Again, the projected numbers seem to be pulled out of thin air.   It would be interesting to learn how the Health Care Reform Act Pollyannas came up with them -- what exact assumptions or presumptions they used to find $10 billion in annual savings.  That's a lot of money.  If this kind of monetary savings is ever achieved through this initiative, it is going to hard to prove.  Why?  Because there are presently no uniform metrics that cross hospital systems, states, Federal and state agencies, 3rd party providers, etc. in order to boil down accurate data around the relationship between hospital infections/safety and hospital readmissions.  This is so vague, remote and skewed that any "hard data" coming out of this "Partnership" will undoubtedly wither under even minimal scrutiny.