The Challenge
In the quest to improve healthcare, increasing attention is being paid to gaining control over quality, by making care safe, effective, timely and centered on patient needs. Payers, regulators and governments are also seeking evidence of safe, high quality care, yet reporting that paints a meaningful picture that is open to sector-wide comparison does not yet exist.
This report shows that a relentless focus on accurately reported outcomes of care is the critical glue that can bring together patients, professionals, providers and those paying for and regulating care.
The Solution
This report by KPMG along with JBara Innovation is based on a literature review and more than 20 interviews conducted with leading C-level leaders of world-class providers in the US, UK, India, Germany, Australia, Canada and Singapore. Roundtable discussions were organized based on the preliminary results in Sydney, Amsterdam, Lausanne and Boston. These roundtable discussions were used to test, validate and further develop the findings in this report.
Outcomes
We found that as healthcare organizations strive to gain control over quality, they can expect the journey towards ‘high reliability’ to take them through various stages, with the pursuit of excellence and safety gradually becoming systematic, towards a culture obsessed with outcomes and safety — and the measurement of these factors.
Responsibility for quality will likely become less reliant on individuals and more on teams. Staff should learn to embrace standardized processes trading individual for collective autonomy,
leading to improved outcomes and a sharp decline in harm rates. Regulatory demands are expected to change significantly, as providers, payers and governments acknowledge the need to converge internal and external measurements and reporting around the key outcomes that matter most to the patient.
These outcome measures should become increasingly internationally standardized — as guidelines increasingly are also. Quality audits will likely become the norm and adopt the same standards as financial assurance, to give regulators, patients and other stakeholders confidence that reports accurately reflect real performance. Likewise, certification should focus primarily on the safety of care, assuring error rates much lower than we are now used to.
