Partnership for Patients: Better Care, Lower Costs

Doctors, nurses and other health care providers in America work incredibly hard to deliver the best care possible to their patients.  Unfortunately, an alarming number of patients are harmed by medical mistakes in the health care system and far too many die prematurely as a result.

The Obama Administration has launched the Partnership for Patients: Better Care, Lower Costs, a new public-private partnership that will help improve the quality, safety, and affordability of health care for all Americans.  The Partnership for Patients brings together leaders of major hospitals, employers, physicians, nurses, and patient advocates along with state and federal governments in a shared effort to make hospital care safer, more reliable, and less costly.  

The two goals of this new partnership are to:

• Keep patients from getting injured or sicker. By the end of 2013, preventable hospital-acquired conditions would decrease by 40% compared to 2010.  Achieving this goal would mean approximately 1.8 million fewer injuries to patients with more than 60,000 lives saved over three years.
• Help patients heal without complication. By the end of 2013, preventable complications during a transition from one care setting to another would be decreased so that all hospital readmissions would be reduced by 20% compared to 2010.  Achieving this goal would mean more than 1.6 million patients would recover from illness without suffering a preventable complication requiring re-hospitalization within 30 days of discharge.   

Achieving these goals will save lives and prevent injuries to millions of Americans, and has the potential to save up to $35 billion across the health care system, including up to $10 billion in Medicare savings, over the next three years.  Over the next ten years, it could reduce costs to Medicare by about $50 billion and result in billions more in Medicaid savings.  This will help put our nation on the path toward a more sustainable health care system.

Building on Local and National Work

In 1999, the landmark Institute of Medicine study, “To Err is Human,” estimated that as many as 98,000 Americans die every year from preventable medical errors. Despite many successful efforts, this statistic has not improved much in the following decade.  And many more patients get injured or sicker from preventable adverse events after being admitted to a hospital.  

After more than a decade of work to understand and address these problems, promising examples of better practices exist, but patients too often are still injured in the course of receiving care.  There is much more work to be done to prevent unnecessary harm to patients.

• At any given time, about one in every 20 patients has an infection related to their hospital care.
• On average, one in seven Medicare beneficiaries is harmed in the course of their care, costing the government an estimated $4.4 billion every year.
• Nearly one in five Medicare patients discharged from the hospital is readmitted within 30 days – that’s approximately 2.6 million seniors at a cost of over $26 billion every year.

Hospital Engagement Networks

Hospitals across the country will have new resources and support to make health care safer and less costly by targeting and reducing the millions of preventable injuries and complications from healthcare acquired conditions. $218 million was awarded to 26 state, regional, national, or hospital system organizations to be Hospital Engagement Networks. As Hospital Engagement Networks, these organizations will help identify solutions already working to reduce health care acquired conditions, and work to spread them to other hospitals and health care providers.

Hospital Engagement Networks will work to develop learning collaboratives for hospitals and provide a wide array of initiatives and activities to improve patient safety. They will be required to conduct intensive training programs to teach and support hospitals in making patient care safer, provide technical assistance to hospitals so that hospitals can achieve quality measurement goals, and establish and implement a system to track and monitor hospital progress in meeting quality improvement goals.

In addition to the Hospital Engagement Networks, $10 million has been awarded to three organizations to create a curriculum in patient safety for the Hospital Engagement Networks, engage Medicare, Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program beneficiaries, their families and caregivers and others in specific activities supporting the aims of the Partnership for Patients, and evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the Partnership for Patients.

Learn more about the efforts of the Partnership for Patients to make care safer.

Improving Care Transitions

One of the ways the Partnership for Patients can achieve its goal of reducing preventable hospital readmissions is to focus on reducing complications during transitions from one care setting to another, particularly for patients with multiple chronic conditions.  Safe, effective, and efficient care transitions require thoughtful collaboration among health care providers, hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities, social service providers, patient caregivers, and patients themselves. 

In April 2011, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced the opportunity for Community-based Organizations to apply for the Community-based Care Transitions Program (CCTP), which was authorized by Section 3026 of the Affordable Care Act. This extraordinary program allows a community of healthcare and social services providers to design and propose a Medicare fee for services benefit to receive payment for care transitions – tailored to the unique needs of the community.

Learn more about Care Transitions and the $500 Million in funding for the Community-based Care Transitions Program (CCTP)

Posted on: April 12, 2011

Last updated: December 14, 2011