sentara's pricing and or contracting strategies for patient portal

What is Sentara Healthcare?

Understanding Health Care Costs. We understand that coming to the hospital can be a stressful time and understand the bills associated with your care can be confusing. At Sentara, we are committed to providing transparent pricing information to help patients and customers make informed health care decisions and ease some of the stress.

What is a patient portal in Sentara?

Sentara Williamsburg Regional Medical Center. 100 Sentara Circle. Williamsburg, VA 23188 757-984-6000

Should Sentara centralize cardiac and vascular procedures?

tal. Sentara was one of the first health systems in the nation to adopt an “e-ICU” system that enables special-ists to efficiently monitor patients in remote ICUs from a central location using televideo and telemedicine applications. Laying the Foundation for Systemwide Improvement. Sentara’s patient safety initiative began in 2002 at its

What is Sentara’s future structure?

and patients. For example, without clear pricing for procedures, patients cannot understand what their costs will be if utilizing a CDHP. In response, Sentara has developed a Web-based portal that will give a detailed price estimate within three days …

What is the Sentara program?

Based on a review of practices in other industries, Sentara developed the “Lessons Learned” program in 2006 to systematically relate safety events and cor-rective actions across the organization . The program was modeled after the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations’ Significant Event Evaluation Information Network, which helps spread learning about safety among personnel at nuclear power plants.

How many hospitals does Sentara Healthcare have?

It operates more than 100 care sites including eight acute-care hospitals (ranging in size from 112 to 569 beds), seven nursing homes, three assisted-living centers, eight outpatient and diagnostic-imaging centers, and 120 physician offices (ranging in size from two to 40 physicians). The system also encompasses a home health care division, a health plan with more than 430,000 members, a medical group, a school of health professions, and a medical residency program affiliated with Eastern Virginia Medical School (Exhibit 1). Sentara employs 19,310 staff, including 380 primary care and specialty care physi-cians in the Sentara Medical Group. Another 3,000 community physicians have active medical privileges at Sentara facilities.

What is Sentara Healthcare?

ABSTRACT: Sentara Healthcare, an integrated health care delivery system serving parts of Virginia and North Carolina, has developed a systematic program to foster a culture of safety throughout its member hospitals, with the aim of reducing the potential for patient harm. During the past five years, Sentara has intensified and expanded the program by engaging the health system’s physician group and other operating units in efforts to: 1) encourage employees to be mindful of the signals of inadequate care and act on those signals; 2) provide leaders with concrete methods of reinforcing employee behaviors that enhance patient safety; 3) reinforce bulwarks against medical error by instituting processes for learning from mistakes; and 4) reward the attainment of high standards of performance. The initiative has helped to reduce the measured rate of serious safety events at Sentara hospitals by 80 percent over seven years.

How has the IOM improved patient safety?

In the decade since the Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued its landmark report, To Err Is Human, there have been a number of successful efforts to improve patient safety in the United States.1 Nevertheless, the nation appears to be far from the goal of eliminating the harm inflicted on some patients by care that is meant to help them.2 A series of Commonwealth Fund case studies conducted on the fifth anniversary of the IOM report identified several health care organizations that had taken promising steps toward realizing one of the IOM’s key recommenda-tions: creating an organizational culture of safety.3This case study, part of a new series documenting the progress that can be achieved with sustained effort, provides a fifth-year update of one of the ear-lier site profiles: Sentara Healthcare.4 In 2002, Sentara Healthcare, an integrated health care delivery system serving southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, launched an initiative aimed at reducing occurrences of harm to its patients and employees by fostering an organizational culture of safety. The initiative focused on training frontline staff in error-prevention tools and behaviors that would improve communication, patient handoffs, and attention to detail.

What is Sentara's safety initiative?

In the first phase of its patient safety initiative, Sentara focused primarily on developing safety habits among nurses and other frontline staff. Physician-leaders incorporated behavioral expectations into a toolbox for medical staff (e.g., use clear, direct physician-to-physician communication to initiate each consulta-tion). However, physicians in general received little reinforcement or auditing, except through the peer review process. The result proved problematic, as other employees perceived a double standard. Sentara lead-ers realized that physicians needed the same kind of training and reinforcement provided to other staff so that they would all be working toward a common goal. Sentara is now training a core group of physi-cians who are both informal and elected leaders of the medical staff. These 65 “safety champion” physicians include primary care physicians (predominantly from the community), emergency department doctors, hos-pitalists, and surgeons. Selection is based on the physi-cians’ potential to influence peers, not on whether they are employed by the system, Burke noted. They receive training in error prevention and leadership skills and are expected to participate in rounds to promote patient safety principles and initiatives (as described above). Sentara is expanding the training to include presidents of medical staffs at each hospital, intensivists, anesthe-siologists, and interventional radiologists.

How many beds does Sentara have?

Sentara’s patient safety initiative began in 2002 at its flagship Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, a 569-bed, level-one trauma center and major teaching hospital in Norfolk, Virginia. Frustrated that the institution was

What is SSER in hospitals?

Sentara uses the Serious Safety Event Rate (SSER) to monitor its improvement in eliminating preventable events of harm. The measure was developed by the consulting firm Healthcare Performance Improvement (in which Sentara has an ownership stake) and is calcu-lated as a rolling 12-month rate of serious safety events per 10,000 adjusted patient days. A serious event is defined using a “safety event classification” as a devia-tion from expected performance or the standard of care resulting in significant (moderate to severe) harm to the patient, including death, permanent loss of function, or injury (Exhibit 5). Examples include misdiagnoses, medication errors, hospital-acquired infections, wrong-site surgery, and falls with serious injury.13 Sentara reports that the serious safety event rate declined about 80 percent across its hospitals from 2003 to 2010 (Exhibit 6). (Because these rates reflect Sentara’s implementation of the Safety Event Classification System, they should not be used for benchmarking to other institutions.) During this time, in-hospital mortality for all conditions declined 23 per-cent across seven Sentara hospitals from 2003 to 2008, when it reached a level almost 50 percent lower (bet-ter) than expected after taking into account patients’ severity of illness (Exhibit 7).

What is the new healthcare transparency regulation?

The new regulations, set to go into effect January 1, 2021, require hospitals to publish a list of all standard hospital charges, including patient responsibility estimates and negotiated rates with payors, in a consumer-friendly format. While many providers likely reacted in shock to the recent Federal judges’ rejection of the American Hospital Association lawsuit 6 filed to dispute this requirement, initiating a legal battle or meeting the bare minimum requirement is only a short-term solution. It is important to take a step back and observe the larger market landscape: Information transparency efforts are intended to accelerate market disruption, and providers that ignore the new requirements may be caught in an unfavorable competitive position trying to regain market share from their more innovative counterparts. To address public trust and regulatory considerations, providers must drive toward greater transparency in their patient communications, their charge structures, and their overall pricing strategy.

How many people do not have a PCP?

A Kaiser Foundation poll found that 45% of 18- to 29-year-olds did not have a PCP compared to only 12% of 65+ year-olds. 15 Younger individuals also often prefer “alternative” health care delivery options, such as virtual telemedicine and urgent care with weekend and evening hours.

What is Deloitte Services?

As consumers increasingly shop for health care services, providers have an opportunity to build trust with their patients and differentiate their organizations by leading the way on pricing transpare ncy.

What is Deloitte Consulting?

Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Health Care Pricing Practice leads our provider, physician practice, and planclients through a full suite of pricing services with a goal of improving the affordability of health carethrough information transparency and data-driven decision-making. As a core part of our end-to-endRevenue Cycle solution, our work includes traditional strategic pricing solutions, managed carecontracting analytics, chargemaster standardization, and full pricing transformations.

What happened to Maria on a ski trip?

It's a story we’ve heard before. Maria was on a ski trip with her friends when she hit a patch of ice and fell, tweaking her shoulder in the process. She waited a few days to see if her mobility would improve, but it soon became clear that she will have to visit a doctor soon. Maria’s primary care physician provided multiple referrals, but she was surprised to discover that few of the recommended providers had price or quality information readily available on their website. Even when she called, she was only referred to a hard-to-interpret set of list prices and told to contact her insurer.

Is OOP liability a critical element of provider selection?

While OOP liability is clearly a critical element of provider selection , consumers do take a holistic view of the options available to them. When we tested the trade-off between OOP payment and quality in a market share simulation, we found that respondents generally preferred lower-cost, lower-quality providers over higher-cost, higher-quality counterparts. However, when looking specifically at providers with the highest list prices, this effect reverses. Put more simply, respondents were willing to pay more out of pocket for quality if the corresponding list price was higher, anchoring the respondents at a starting higher price. This finding illustrates the value of providing transparent information, and when used effectively with other data points, list prices can serve as an anchor to highlight and attract patients to superior-quality providers. This result may also indicate that fears of a “race to the bottom” with price transparency are premature; rather, transparency provides an opportunity for high-quality providers to command higher prices by thinking strategically about how to share pricing information with patients in conjunction with other tools such as marketing and patient experience efforts.