Becker's Spine Review

19 Sign up for Becker's Orthopedic, Spine Business & Pain Management E-Weeklies at www.BeckersOrthopedicandSpine.com or call (800) 417-2035 We can also now generate reports for any stakeholder who purchases care or refers care to out center. If you are a self-insured employer, a third-party payer, or a referring physician, we can demonstrate what our quality of care looks like based on the hundreds of previous patients treated in your health plan or whom you have referred. Q: Where do you see data collection in the spine field headed over the next five years? McG: There is a big gap in longitudinal patient reported outcomes data collection. The low hanging fruit has been process measures and basic safe- ty data obtainable from claims data; were antibiotics given, was a surgical checklist utilized, was best evidence followed, was the patient re-admitted within 30-days of hospital discharge? This has remained the state-of-the-art this past decade. As measurement of the numerator (effectiveness of care) in the value equa- tion evolves, intelligent value-based reform will be enabled. Then spine care providers and stakeholders will be able to institute value-based purchasing, individualized treatment paradigms and sliding scale capitated payment and bundled payment models for risk stratified patients. All of this will be pow- ered by the science of practice and maximized to achieve its goal. JS: Over the next five years we will be focused on using data smartly. I would urge providers to begin to construct or participate in integrated prac- tice units. IPUs have been described by many, but the best description was published in a Harvard Business Review in an article by Dr. Tom Lee and Michael Porter called "The Strategy That Will Fix Health Care." IPUs are designed to base care delivery models on patient need and to strive for the best patient outcomes at the lowest possible costs. Their article discusses advancing the value agenda, but doing so with a good eye towards competitive strategy and operational effectiveness. They recom- mend physicians become involved and organize IPUs, measure outcomes and costs for patients, make movements toward bundled payments for care delivery cycles, integrate care delivery across facilities, and then expand their excellent care geographically. Virginia Mason and others have done a great job on this. If I could tell spine surgeons one thing, it would be to study and analyze maximizing the value of the care delivery so that it provides excellent care at the appropriate cost, and consider doing it through the physician-driven formation of IPUs. n 140262 Ad - Becker Spine Conference - Lumbar Spine Endoscopy v1.indd 1 3/17/14 12:32 PM "Historically, a lot of spine surgeons nationwide have been very good at clinical intelligence, and we as a field have been getting better at business intelligence. I think over the next five to 10 years we will need to master predictive intelligence and analytics." — Dr. Jonathan Slotkin, Geisinger Health System Neurosciences Institute

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