From Ascension
In 2012 Ascension partnered with Narayana Health of India and the government of the Cayman Islands in part to create an opportunity to learn ways to improve quality and reduce costs at U.S. hospitals.
To advance that goal, this month leaders and physicians from Ascension hospitals will begin rotating through Health City Cayman Islands to observe the systems and processes in use by the team of HCCI physicians and caregivers imported from Narayana and its founder Dr. Devi Shetty.
“It has the potential to be a key convening point for innovation in the U.S.,” Scott Lambert, Vice President, Ascension Holdings, recently told Merrill Goozner, editor of Modern Healthcare, during his recent visit to Grand Cayman to tour HCCI. “We’re starting to tell the story to our [healthcare] delivery side.”
Ascension’s participation also offers new opportunities to expand and support the Ascension Mission of serving all persons with special attention to those who are struggling the most.
“To local officials and business leaders here, Health City and the government’s plan to build an affiliated medical school represent an economic development engine, the island nation’s bid to become a healthcare mecca for the Caribbean basin, Latin America and the U.S.,” Goozner says. “But for Ascension … the venture represents a learning opportunity. It wants to see if its new partner’s lean healthcare model, perfected in India by Dr. Devi Shetty – whom the Wall Street Journal in 2009 dubbed the Henry Ford of heart surgery – can be transferred to its 129 hospitals in the U.S.”
The operating rooms at HCCI run 12-16 hours a day, whereas U.S. operating rooms generally operate eight hours a day. Its surgeons can operate 12 hours a day, six days a week. A typical Narayana surgeon performs 10 to 12 surgeries a week.
“Surgeries under Dr. Shetty’s model are broken down into routines and parceled out to staff,” Goozner says. “Junior surgeons perform the openings and closings while senior surgeons, who are subspecialists and have done hundreds of similar operations, perform the core of the operation.”
Outcomes rival those found in advanced industrial countries, he says. According to a Harvard Business School study, Narayana’s main Bangalore hospital, where the system was perfected, had a 1.3 percent mortality rate and 1 percent infection rate for coronary artery bypass graft surgeries compared with 1.2 percent and 1 percent rates, respectively, in the U.S. The Joint Commission granted certification to Health City after it was open for nine just months.
Click here to read more about Goozner’s impressions of HCCI and its potential to improve U.S. healthcare in an era of rising costs and reduced reimbursements, as well as local background on the creation of Health City Cayman Islands.
IMAGE: hcci exterior
For more on this story go to:
http://ascension.org/news/2016/2016february/hcci-in-healthcare-pub-about-learning