Sutter Health, serving Northern California, has joined 15 other health systems in the High Value Healthcare Collaborative (HVHC). The goal is to improve health care, lower costs, and move best practices out to the national provider community. According to today's press release, HVHC will focus on nine increasingly prevalent treatment areas that have a wide variation in rates, costs and outcomes. They include total knee replacement, diabetes, asthma, hip surgery, heart failure, perinatal care, depression, spine surgery and weight-loss surgery.
Why are such efforts important? You'd think that if there was an effective treatment for specific illness that everyone would get that treatment. Right? But that happens only about 50% of the time, according to the Quality Alliance. Also, patients have different outcomes and are charged different rates depending on where the patient lives, which doctors and hospitals provide their health care, and their racial/ethnic status.
Now, the reasons for this situation are probably many and are not currently known. Hopefully, the HVHC, by sharing real-life data, will begin to develop some answers to these questions that have been dogging US Healthcare for over 30 years.
See the Quality Alliance website for more information.
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