The UCLA Health has joined forces with a group of premier health providers to collaborate on research and share data on costs and outcomes. The first-of-its-kind collaborative will work to identify and adopt best practices and standards for health care delivery that will improve outcomes, lower costs and accelerate the development and quality of care in the 21st century.
Other members of the National High-Value Healthcare Collaborative include the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Denver Health, Intermountain Healthcare, the Baylor Health Care System, Beaumont Hospitals, MaineHealth, White Health Care, Sutter, University of Iowa Health Care, Virginia Mason Medical Center, and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.
"The quest for top-quality medical care is a never-ending process," said Dr. David Feinberg, CEO of the UCLA Hospital System and associate vice chancellor for health sciences. "Focusing on patient-centered outcomes research with our peer institutions is yet another way the UCLA Health is working to improve quality and care in the most cost-effective manner. We expect this research will provide useful data for all members of the collaborative and others committed to advancing health care delivery."
The collaborative is currently focusing its work on nine increasingly prevalent condition- and disease-specific areas that have been shown to have wide variation in rates, costs and outcomes nationally: total knee replacement, diabetes, asthma, hip surgery, heart failure, perinatal care, depression, spine surgery and weight-loss surgery. Additional high-variation, high-cost conditions that affect diverse populations will be added over time.
Members of the collaborative were selected based on a variety of criteria, including having strong research and quality-improvement processes, robust health-information-technology infrastructures, a commitment of personnel and operational and financial resources, and demonstrated experience in collaborating with other institutions.
In signing on, members of the collaborative commit to a process that includes sharing not only cost information but research-based information on optimizing safety and positive patient outcomes.
"We believe that physicians and health care leaders are in a key position to implement meaningful change that makes care safer, more efficient, more effective and more attuned to each patient's needs and preferences," said Dr. James N. Weinstein, director of the Dartmouth Institute and president of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic. "At the same time, based on our research and individual experience, we know that by doing this, we actually lower costs."
The UCLA Health has for more than half a century provided the best in health care and the latest in medical technology to the people of Los Angeles and the world. Comprised of Ronald Reagan UCLA Health - Santa Monica Medical Center–UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital, the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA, UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital and the UCLA Medical Group, with its wide-reaching system of primary care and specialty care offices throughout the region, the UCLA Health is among the most comprehensive and advanced health care systems in the world. For information about clinical programs or help in choosing a personal physician, call 800-UCLA-MD1 or visit www.uclahealth.org.
