Last year, Mayo Clinic, Denver Health, Intermountain Healthcare, Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Cleveland Clinic, and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice formed a healthcare collaborative.
The High Value Healthcare Collaborative (NVHC) was formed to improve healthcare, lower costs, and to move best practices out to the national provider community. On June 3rd, it was announced that eight additional major health systems have plans to join the Collaborative.
Baylor Health Care System, Beaumont Hospitals, MaineHealth, Scott & White Health Care, Sutter Health, UCLA Health System, University of Iowa Health Care, and Virginia Mason Medical Center will be part of the Collaborative. The commitment to the Collaborative will involve sharing care pathways, costs, and outcomes data with all of the partners and the public as the Collaborative adopts best practices and expands standards of measurement.
The new partners were selected based on having strong research and quality improvement processes, a robust health information technology infrastructure, and a commitment of personnel, operational, and financial resources.
The Collaborative is currently working together on nine increasingly prevalent conditions and disease-specific areas that have been shown to have wide variations in rates, costs, and outcomes nationally. These conditions and diseases are total knee replacement, diabetes, asthma, hip surgery, heart failure, perinatal care, depression, spine surgery, and weight loss surgery.
For example, data on total knee replacement a procedure performed more than 300,000 times a year in the U.S. incurs costs that can range from an average of $16,000 to $24,000 per surgery. Data has been collected from the founding institutions in the Collaborative and is currently being analyzed. Data analytics are facilitated through the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, the coordinating arm for the Collaborative.
