Beaumont Named To National Panel For High Value Health Care

Plenty of medical procedures vary wildly in both cost and quality depending which hospital you choose.

Now, Beaumont Health System has been named to a national collaborative of health systems designed to smooth out those peaks and valleys -- improving health care quality, cutting costs and expanding best practices.

Beaumont president and CEO Gene Michalski announced the health system's entry into the High Value Healthcare Collaborative at the Detroit Regional Chamber Mackinac Policy Conference.

Currently, the collaborative is working in nine increasingly prevalent conditions that have been shown nationally to have wide variation in rates, costs and outcomes. These are total knee replacement, diabetes, asthma, hip surgery, heart failure, perinatal care, depression, spine surgery and weight loss surgery.

Criteria for being selected to the collaborative included strong research and quality improvement processes, a robust health information technology infrastructure, a commitment of personnel, operational and financial resources, and demonstrated experience in collaboration across institutions.

The collaborative was launched last December by the Mayo Clinic, Denver Health, Geisinger Health System, Intermountain Healthcare, Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Cleveland Clinic and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.

Beaumont is the only Michigan health system just added to the collaborative. The others are Baylor Health Care System, MaineHealth, Scott & White Health Care, Sutter Health, UCLA Health System, University of Iowa Health Care and Virginia Mason Medical Center.

Beaumont has three hospitals with a total of 1,744 beds, more than 14,000 full-time equivalent employees and 3,700 doctors in Oakland, Wayne and Macomb counties.

More at www.beaumont.edu.