by
Paula C. Squires
Virginia Business
January 2004
Method
used to develop service line information
Virginia
Health Information (VHI) developed this report
for Virginia Business using information
from the Virginia hospital discharge database
administered by VHI. Within each geographic region
the five hospitals reporting the greatest number
of discharges (for calendar year 2002) for each
selected service line are listed. In addition,
the physician with the greatest number of discharges
reported by the top hospital for each service
is reported. VHI verified physician licensing
and specialty information using data obtained
from the Virginia Board of Medicine.
In
most professions, experience counts. A lot. Most people
wouldn’t want a novice building their dream home
or delivering their baby. In health care, research shows
that the more experience a hospital or doctor has with
a specific procedure, the greater the likelihood for
success. Today, that data is readily available in Virginia
though VHI, Virginia Health Information, a nonprofit,
public-private partnership. It was created 10 years
ago after the General Assembly mandated health care
providers, including hospitals and others, to report
data that would be helpful in assessing quality, costs
and health-care strategies.
A sampling of just some of the comparative data can
be found on the following pages. Virginia Business hired
VHI to provide charts showing which hospitals and doctors
perform the most in-patient procedures in seven service
areas: invasive cardiology, medical cardiology, gastroenterology,
oncology, orthopedic surgery, urological surgery and
vascular surgery.
The charts cover the state’s five major regions.
Say you’re a patient about to undergo invasive
heart surgery in Central Virginia. The hospital reporting
the greatest number of these procedures is CJW Medical
Center in Richmond, with 1,737 procedures (meaning surgeries
and other in-patient care) under its belt. The doctor
at that hospital with the most experience in the specialty
is Dr. Mark Johns.
That’s how precise the information is. Since Virginia
joined a growing number of states, 37 altogether, in
collecting health care information, VHI has become the
commonwealth’s central repository. “This
is a one-stop shop. Virginia benefits, because it has
all this information in one place,” says Executive
Director Michael T. Lundberg.
Among VHI’s products are consumer guides on such
topics as long-term care and an annual industry report
on Virginia hospitals and nursing facilities with rankings
on their efficiency and productivity. With much of VHI’s
information offered free to the public, it’s not
surprising that its Web site at www.vhi.org gets about
135,000 hits a month. Other customized data is offered
for sale to clients that include small and large companies,
heath care providers looking for a competitive edge
and community service organizations.
Lundberg says he hears from consumers about hospital
bills. “We get calls from people who are getting
judgments. They say, ‘We’re being charged
$30,000 for a two-day stay.’ They want to know
if that’s reasonable.” VHI can check on
what is a reasonable fee for a procedure in a specific
area. One of its more recent projects involved Anthem
Blue Cross Blue Shield — Virginia’s largest
health insurance company — which needed information
on coronary artery bypass graft mortality and readmission
rates for a new hospital patient-safety incentive program.
While Virginia’s data collection isn’t the
most innovative in the country — Michigan and
Pennsylvania’s programs require medical error
reporting as well — it has come a long way in
a decade. Today there’s plenty of information
on the state’s 17 licensed HMOs, hospital cardiac
care mortality rates and even outpatient surgical data,
which is hard to come by in some states. Looking ahead,
Lundberg says the biggest challenge will be ensuring
that the information remains of value to a wide variety
of stakeholders and that it fairly reflects differences
in performance.
