CAO Quality Care Initiatives
By Denny Tritinger, Executive Director
Three years ago, we joined together as The Centers for Advanced Orthopaedics to preserve the private-practice standard of care, a purpose that has become our driving mission. While each care provider and each member of our staff strives every day to deliver the best possible care experience to our patients, by leveraging our size, we now have the opportunity to develop clinical protocols and quality/outcome measures that will provide measuable improves to patient care at reduced costs.
In today’s healthcare world, the typically adversarial relationships between payors and large groups such as The Centers must instead become cooperative partnerships. In this spirit, we are meeting with Carefirst, United, Cigna, Anthem and Aetna to begin to develop the key quality measures that will be critical to providing the best possible care at the lowest cost. The importance of measuring healthcare quality and cost effectiveness is no longer in doubt. However, quantifying these items is a complex and challenging process, so we are reaching out to our payors now to help to ensure that our success and their assessment of our success will be based on the quality indicators we are jointly developing.
To oversee these initiatives, The Centers has formed a Quality Improvement Committee, chaired by Dr. Philip Schneider of the Montgomery Orthopaedics Division. The committee has already developed quality protocols for sprained ankles and tennis elbow and will be developing additional protocols in the near future. Through the strength in our numbers of more than 135 surgeons and 270 total providers, we believe that the clinical protocols we are developing will have a large impact on our discussions about cost-effective, quality care.