A new study has found that hospitals benefit immensely from surgical complications. How employers like Wal-Mart and health care providers are tackling this problem.

FORTUNE — American health care is screwed up. It is a bizarre market where the prices that patients pay do not match the quality of care.
Unfortunately, that’s old news. What is new is the nitty-gritty — details about why hospitals might not have any financial incentive to follow best practices. A new paper from researchers affiliated with Harvard, Boston Consulting Group, and nonprofit health care delivery system Texas Health Resources suggests that, in some cases, providing worse care pays off for hospitals. On a hopeful note, some companies are stepping in to challenge the system.
The research group published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association on April 16 that looked at more than 34,000 surgical patients who were discharged from 12 hospitals in 2010. Out of those patients, 1,820 suffered at least one complication from surgery. Of course, patients with complications cost more to treat — they spend more time in the hospital and require resources like nurses and beds.
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But the study found that these patients didn’t simply cost more to treat, but the majority of them generated a much larger profit for hospitals.
Privately insured patients with surgical complications delivered almost $40,000 more in profits (per patient) than privately insured patients who had no complications. The margin was smaller for patients with Medicare — those patients who had complications earned the hospital around $1,700 more than those who didn’t have any.
Hospitals didn’t make the same profit margins off of Medicaid patients or those who paid out of pocket, but combined, those two latter groups only accounted for 10% of the total population of patients studied.
That means 90% of surgical discharges at these hospitals during 2010 participated in a payment system that rewarded the hospital if patients faced at least one surgical complication.
“We are entering this phase of tremendous experimentation in changing the model of payment,” says Atul Gawande, the corresponding author on the paper who is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a professor of surgery at Harvard’s medical school, and a medical journalist.
“We have a bonus system here that we’ve known has rewarded perverse behavior, but now we’re able to put some real numbers on it, and it’s a bigger bonus than we’ve ever understood.”
Gawande has described parts of this flawed rewards system in his landmark story “The Cost Conundrum,” which explains some of the financial incentives that drive the discrepancy in the quality of care. Namely, at many hospitals, physicians earn money for every procedure or test performed, regardless of the outcome.
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This mismatch happens all the time in the corporate world — the stated goals of a company may say one thing, but the company could have conflicting systemic financial rewards in place. Take the rogue trader who lost UBS $2.3 billion in 2011. He messed up, but in general, traders are encouraged to take big risky bets, and are rewarded when those bets pay off for companies. Effective organizations not only proclaim their ideals in grand vision statements but reward the kinds of behavior that back up those ideals.
In the case of hospitals, some may argue that the number of complications is out of the administration’s hands. That isn’t necessarily true, Gawande says. There are checklists and procedures that, if enforced, can make surgery safer and reduce the number of complications. “This business case has been difficult to make,” he says. “It will always pay to open another operating room or increase number of patients.” But CEOs of medical centers have a tougher time seeing the payoff from investments to improve the quality of care.
CEOs in other industries are starting to place a premium on quality of health care, however. It makes sense — if employers are paying for health care, they want to pay for care at better, more efficient facilities that don’t have any incentive to charge for procedures that could be superfluous.
That’s why Wal-Mart (WMT) announced in 2012 that it would foot the entire bill for certain bundled treatments — heart, spine, and transplant surgeries — if employees go to one of six designated health care organizations for treatment. Bundling the treatments involves streamlining the billing process. Organizations that offer bundled treatments enable whoever is paying to avoid a major financial headache. Another draw of going with the selected organizations, says Wal-Mart spokesman Randy Hargrove, is that they prioritize patient outcome over patient volume and have low readmission rates.
Take, for example, the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, which is one of the facilities included in Wal-Mart’s program. Doctors there are on salary. “Because physicians are employed and salaried, they don’t have a direct financial incentive to do a particular thing, but really to do what’s in the best interests of the patient,” says Michael McMillan, executive director of marketing and network services for the clinic.
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Pursuing the best interest of the patient — what an idea. Granted, Wal-Mart’s program is a new experiment. To last, it will probably have to both provide patients better care and save Wal-Mart money.
But it is a push against the grain in an otherwise broken system. Hospitals need not profit from sicker patients. It is a simple concept but a massive management challenge: reward physicians and institutions that are the best at keeping people well.
Sumber: management.fortune.cnn.com

It was supposed to be a short stay. In 2006, Roger Anderson was to undergo surgery to relieve a painfully compressed spinal disk. His wife, Karen, figured the staff at the hospital, in Portland, Ore., would understand how to care for someone with Parkinson’s disease.
GUNA mengatasi imej yang berkembang di masyarakat terkait banyaknya penolakan pasien miskin oleh rumah sakit, Pemerintah Kota Depok menggelar penandatanganan perjanjian kerjasama Jaminan Kesehatan Daerah (Jamkesda) tahun 2013 di aula lantai 1 Balaikota Depok. Penandatanganan tersebut dilakukan oleh Wali Kota Depok Nur Mahmudi Ismail dengan 32 direktur RS dan klinik di Kota Depok.
Jakarta, PKMK. Seluruh rumah sakit (RS) di Jakarta diharapkan telah terakreditasi di tahun 2014. Saat ini, yang telah mendapatkan akreditasi adalah 76 dari 153 RS di Jakarta. “Jadi, saat ini yang sudah terakreditasi sekitar 49 persen,” ucap Dien Emawati, Ketua Dinas Kesehatan DKI Jakarta, di Jakarta (17/4/2013). Masyarakat semakin kritis dalam menilai mutu pelayanan kesehatan dewasa ini, khususnya yang disajikan oleh RS. “Maka, pelatihan akreditasi bagi manajemen RS sangat penting,” ucap Emawati. Dengan pelatihan akreditasi, seluruh SDM di RS diharapkan benar-benar mengetahui standar pelayanan pasien. Alhasil, kasus malpraktek bisa semakin berkurang. “Pelatihan akreditasi RS di Indonesia telah dimulai sejak tahun 1995. Itu dimulai dari akreditasi terhadap lima pelayanan dan berlanjut kepada 16 pelayanan,” tambah Emawati.
Jakarta, PKMK – Basuki T. Purnama (Ahok), Wakil Gubernur DKI Jakarta menyampaikan bahwa pihaknya telah mengusulkan penghapusan Pajak Penjualan atas Barang Mewah (PPn BM) pada alat medis. Pertimbangan usulan itu, alat medis tidak bisa dikategorikan sebagai barang mewah. “Jika peralatan operasi jantung digunakan untuk menolong pasien, masa’ digolongkan sebagai barang mewah,” ungkap Ahok saat membuka Pelatihan Akreditasi Rumah Sakit Terbaru di Jakarta (17/4/2013). Usulan itu disampaikan Ahok saat rapat membahas rencana kenaikan harga BBM (bahan bakar minyak) subsidi dengan Presiden RI Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono dan para menteri berlangsung. “Saya menyampaikan usulan itu ke Bu Wakil Menteri Keuangan Ani Ratnawaty” kata Ahok. Kemudian, usulan itu sudah dicatat oleh Menteri Koordinator Perekonomian RI M. Hatta Rajasa.
Makassar, Undang-undang Praktik Kedokteran melarang bidan untuk memasang alat kontrasesi IUD dan implan tanpa pengawasan dokter. Bidan hanya diperbolehkan memberi kontrasepsi berupa pil dan kondom. Adanya peraturan ini dinilai menghambat kesuksesan program KB karena membatasi kewenangan bidan.
Makassar, Di era 90-an, bidan memiliki peran ganda sebagai tenaga kesehatan untuk membantu persalinan sekaligus sebagai ujung tombak pergerakan program KB. Namun miris, banyak bidan-bidan baru yang kini tak tahu cara pemasangan alat kontrasepsi. Bidan-bidan ini akan diberi pelatihan khusus.
Jakarta, “Jamu… Jamu…” suara mbok jamu yang menjajakan jamu dalam gendongannya dulu kerap terdengar di sekitar rumah warga. Tapi kini jamu tak hanya ada di bakul gendongan atau gerobak penjual jamu, tapi sudah masuk ke rumah sakit.





