SAZ Value Based Health Care Program.
The SAZ Value Based healthcare program is a project of knowledge and best practice sharing between healthcare professionals in dedicated reflection sessions
The SAZ is a collaboration of 29 regional hospitals in the Netherlands. SAZ was interested in improving the quality of their care, whilst keeping it comprehensive and affordable. They wanted to implement a Value-Based Healthcare program to achieve this. The group teamed up with healthcare analytics provider LOGEX to ensure the program would be based on the existing data of the care providers involved. It was important to SAZ to not increase the administrative burden of their healthcare professionals for this program. LOGEX is able to facilitate this by analyzing and benchmarking data that are collected for other primary purposes, like for instance quality evaluation or financial analyses.
Key in the program are the reflection sessions. Per medical condition, healthcare professionals of participating hospitals and other relevant care settings are organized in integrated multidisciplinary improvement teams. Participants meet on a regular basis in these reflection sessions to discuss the insights derived from the benchmarking and data analysis provided by LOGEX. The care providers brainstorm about how to further improve quality of care. Every improvement team chooses location specific improvement focus points on which it works during the duration of the program. These focus points are transparent to all participants. It is therefore possible and stimulated to team up with other hospitals to jointly work on overlapping focus points.
The program started in 2018 with 11 hospitals working together around 2 patient groups. The program has been expanding ever since. Currently healthcare professionals of 28 regional hospitals work together with professionals from other relevant care settings on improving patient value and focus on eight medical conditions:
– Birth care
– Hip fracture
– Colorectal cancer
– Stroke
– Heart failure
– Gall bladder disease
– Inguinal hernia
– Gastroenterological endoscopy
The impact of the program so far is impressive. For instance, in the program around colon cancer, the following improvements in de population of patients with colorectal cancer have been achieved:
– General complications decreased from 15,8% in 2018 to 12,3% in 2019 (-22%)
– Complications due to surgery decreased from 19,3% in 2018 to 15% in 2019 (-22%)
– Extended hospitalization (> 14 days) decreased from 13,3% in 2018 to 10,6% (-21%)