Curaspan seeks low-hanging savings on re-admissions

The search is on for health care savings.

One place to find them is by tracking and reducing re-admissions. When the doctor says "out patient, out" he doesn't want to be seeing you again.

Reducing re-admissions by just half-a-percent per year, says Curaspan, can save serious money.

It doesn't sound like a heck of a lot, but do the math. Figure $7,200 on each patient, 15 patients every month. That's $108,000 per month, nearly $1.3 million in a year. Run that figure across the whole hospital system in the U.S. and you're talking $7.3 billion.

This is not a pie-in-the-sky number. They aggregated year 2009 data from 137 hospitals, most with 100 beds or more. Regularly reviewing a monthly report on re-admissions starts doing the job after just six months.

Curaspan is offering this in the form of Software as a Service (SaaS), meaning hospitals don't have to buy new gear to make this happen. Just run your data through Curaspan eDischarge, institutionalize the analysis as a discipline, and start saving today.

Curaspan runs your data through what it calls its Clinical Intelligence Data Bank which tracks it by post-acute provider, placement, diagnosis and admitting physician. The reports come through as PDF files, as Excel spreadsheets or as Crystal Report files -- the last is an existing business intelligence program.

Want a webinar on this? Of course you do. April 15 at 2 PM EDT. Sign up here.

This is a great example of how health IT actually works. We are not talking here of killing grandma. We're talking about saving her. Keep her from bouncing in-and-out of hospital like a yo-yo and she'll be happy, you'll be happy, and the hospital will be happy too.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com