Driven By Reforms, Cleveland Hospitals Reimagine Themselves
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Cleveland’s three major health systems are working to transform their businesses.
Largely driven by healthcare reform, three major health systems in Cleveland are working toward transforming their businesses to become more efficient, improve customer satisfaction, and improve accessibility, according to The Plain Dealer. As part of the shift, University Hospitals is building outpatient clinics across Northeast Ohio; the Cleveland Clinic is engaging in deals to provide care to large employers nationwide; and MetroHealth is looking to invest up to as much as $1 billion in its main campus with the goal of fundamentally changing the way it delivers care.
The Cleveland Clinic has offered contracts with some of the nation’s largest employers for several years including Walmart, Lowe’s, Boeing, and 15 additional large employers. They are currently constructing new facilities worldwide including a medical center in Abu Dhabi, according to Becker’s Hospital Review.
Dr. Michael Anderson, chief medical officer at University Hospitals told The Plain Dealer, “Consumers are demanding more and more transparency and want to know what things cost. They are saying, ‘Dr. Jones, I’d love for you to do my hip replacement, but I went on your website and you cost X and another hospital costs less than that. Walk me through why.’”
Each system is taking its own unique approach to transforming treatment. The Cleveland Clinic calls this process “clinical transformation,” and it refers to a widespread campaign to standardize protocols at hospitals throughout its system. “In any industry, whether it be the hotel industry or the car industry, if you reduce variation you always improve the quality of the product, and you always decrease the cost,” Dr. Brian Donley, the Clinic’s chief of staff, told The Plain Dealer. “And that’s where our focus is.”
University Hospitals’ new “high reliability medicine” program has a similar goal. “We are expanding by leaps and bounds by merger and acquisition, all of which is good,” Anderson said. “The question we have to ask is, ‘Are we assuring every patient and employee is safe?’ That is foundational to what we do, and we want to make sure we continue to emphasize that.”
According to Becker’s Hospital Review, UH and Ravenna, OH-based Robinson Health System signed a letter of intent in April that would fully integrate Robinson Memorial with the University Hospitals. And University Hospitals and Samaritan Regional Health System, based in Ashland, OH, have also said they were taking steps toward signing a letter of intent to integrate SRHS into the UH system.
MetroHealth is using a slightly different strategy. It recently created a department of “integration and transformation” which is focused on consistency of care and on re-thinking hospital organization from both a patient and physician standpoint. “We are shooting to transform how health care gets delivered in Cuyahoga County and, through our example, the nation,” said Dr. Akram Boutros, MetroHealth’s chief executive.
MetroHealth’s campus overhaul will bring modernized operations to the health system and add health and fitness programs for the community, as well as transform the means of providing care to the community at large.
A large part of each hospital system’s approach is also to broaden their audience for care, by tapping into new markets for healthcare, whether it is by providing cell phones to “high-risk” elderly patients as MetroHealth is doing; or reaching out to new patients across the country as The Cleveland Clinic is doing, it means that the systems are working harder to reach new patients and make treatment more convenient.