Lowering physician hospital resource consumption using low-cost, low-technology computing

Anderson Area Medical Center physicians have been provided disease-specific and procedure-specific profiles of their practice experiences for more than 5 years. For 4 years, physicians were provided reports, in a variety of formats, detailing their clinical outcomes and consumption of hospital resources in treating patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI), pneumonia, cholecystectomy, stroke, congestive heart failure, and total hip replacement. For the past 18 months, physicians have been provided a uniform format of monthly physician-specific reporting for stroke, AMI, pneumonia, diabetes, congestive heart failure, cholecystectomy, total hip replacement, new-born delivery, angina, and hernia repair. Using only a modest PC platform with database, word processing, and graphics programs operating in a DOS environment, an effective disease-reporting and procedure-reporting program is provided to medical staff with 3 person-days of effort per month. Education-based physician-practice reporting is effective in encouraging more resource-efficient decision making on the part of medical staff members. Average length of stay and total charges can be reduced significantly by providing physicians with profiles that show them their relative ranking with peers of several outcome and resource variables. Actual aggregate reductions in average total charges for each of three groups of patients profiled following educational reporting to physicians were $203,680 (AMI), $220,296 (pneumonia), and $146,832 (hip replacement). Total benefit for these three educational reports was $570,808. If educational effects persist for 1 year in the physician groups, the annualized estimate of aggregate charge reductions for 390 AMI patients, 483 pneumonia patients, and 52 hip-replacement patients is $1,568,644. Cost savings to the hospital would be near $706,000.