Jefferson Health saw a significant opportunity to create a comprehensive patient blood management (PBM) program to reduce blood usage while decreasing costs, help address staffing issues, increase revenue and most importantly, improve patient outcomes.
In an August Becker's Hospital Review webinar sponsored by Accumen, Chris Tomlinson, enterprise vice president of clinical lab, pathology & radiology and imaging at Jefferson Health in Philadelphia, and Joe Thomas, vice president at Accumen, discussed the importance of a comprehensive PBM program and how Jefferson Health's program has benefited its system and patients.
Four key takeaways were:
1. Jefferson Health seized the opportunity to reduce costs and improve care through a comprehensive patient blood management program. "Coming out of COVID, we were dealing with blood shortages, trying to recover surgical volumes and reduce costs and were struggling with length of stay," Mr. Tomlinson said. "All of that helped to help bring focus and a sense of urgency to this blood management project."
Jefferson Health, a fast-growing, 18-hospital health system in the Philadelphia area, anticipated it would be able to save $2.6 million over three years in blood acquisition costs (15 percent) and create $8.3 million in additional revenue and savings with an anemia program.
2. A comprehensive PBM program must go beyond managing blood as a product. "If you just focus on blood as a product, you limit your total value creation potential to about 70 percent," Mr. Thomas said. "Simply reducing overutilization of blood products means you hit a plateau at some point. A patient blood management program must focus on reducing avoidable transfusions, improving a patient's blood health and outcomes, driving revenue and reducing costs." For example, dealing with preoperative anemia, which is a prevalent and commonly treatable problem, can reduce blood usage as well as improve patient outcomes.
3. Jefferson Health's successful PBM program implementation leveraged best practices gleaned from Accumen. These best practices included management and clinical commitment, dedicated resources and ongoing benchmarking. At the beginning of the process, Accumen customized its proven methodology for Jefferson Health. "These program fundamentals make up the methodology our team has used in more than 400 hospitals across the country," Mr. Thomas said. "The goal of this program infrastructure is to generate not only rapid but sustainable success." Components are:
- Ongoing benchmarking to illustrate strong business and clinical case.
- A multidisciplinary team of executive and clinical leaders.
- Dedicated resources including physician champion(s), project coordinator and clinical navigators.
- Clinical expertise and experience implementing patient blood and anemia management.
- Robust and meaningful analytics, scorecards, metrics and dashboards.
- An extensive focus on clinical transformation.
- IT resources and software support.
4. By building an infrastructure that increased personal accountability and focused on education, Jefferson Health realized significant results. "We made our aggressive goals very visible to senior leadership at all divisions," Mr. Tomlinson said. "We had a competitive nature about the project; no division wanted to be in the bottom percentiles during our big report-outs. We put names to paper in each service line so people knew where they stood compared with peers."
Educating surgeons about how addressing preoperative anemia could make a significant difference in blood utilization and patient outcomes was successful in increasing acceptance of the program. Now, Jefferson Health's anemia program is mapped to patients scheduled for specific surgeries. "When patients come through as anemic, it's expected that they will be evaluated as candidates for preoperative anemia management," Mr. Thomas said.
As a result of this program, Jefferson Health estimates it has avoided 269 potential complications and 60 potential deaths, has reallocated nearly 15,000 nursing hours and has saved $5.8 million in activity-based costs.
By broadening blood management beyond only the product and implementing the infrastructure and process to successfully do so, health systems can realize significant savings in time, costs and resources while improving patient health and outcomes.
To view the webinar recording, click here.
To register for upcoming webinars, click here.