Hospital Association of Rhode Island recognizes leaders, lauds accomplishments

PROVIDENCE – Taking a page from such high-risk industries as nuclear power, aviation and amusement parks, Hospital Association of Rhode Island President Michael Souza said that HARI is collaborating with Press Ganey, a health care industry consulting firm, to conduct High Reliability Organizations training for its member hospitals. With hospital errors identified as the third leading cause of death nationally in the United States, it’s all too clear that health care environments designed to heal people do the exact opposite, all too frequently. High Reliability focuses on the culture of a hospital – and not on specific departments – it’s about working to achieve zero harm, said Souza.
“It’s not about finger-pointing; it’s about looking at what went wrong, addressing the root cause and reporting back [to the management team],” he said. Participating hospitals’ managements are asked to meet daily to review such issues and identify how many days have transpired since the last situation that harmed a patient, he said. More than 100 managers have been trained to date, and Souza hopes that all employees will eventually receive training. During this past year, Our Lady of Fatima, South County and Westerly hospitals, Landmark Medical Center and Roger Williams Medical Center began training, and Souza anticipates that HARI’s remaining member hospitals – Butler, Kent, Memorial and Women & Infants hospitals and Providence VA Medical Center – will start training in 2016.
In addition to the High Reliability initiative, Souza also highlighted the $200 million in additional revenue that went into the fiscal 2017 state budget that is allocated to Rhode Island hospitals. He talked with Providence Business News about HARI’s accomplishments several days after the group’s annual meeting, which was held at the Crowne Plaza Providence-Warwick in Warwick on Nov. 21. That $200 million is not a big number, given that Rhode Island hospitals are a $4 billion industry, said Souza, but it does help hospitals get the money they need to invest in their facilities and transform care to address population health. “It’s hard to move into that world [of population health management] if you don’t have the investment,” he said. That $200 million came from a combination of revenues, including improved Medicaid rates, a special uptick in Medicare rates paid to hospitals in Rhode Island to be more on par with payments made to hospitals in Massachusetts and improvements to the Rhode Island Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner’s cap on commercial rates, said Souza.
Addressing patients’ financial liabilities remains a key industry issue in 2017, as does the state budget, he said. “How will hospitals be able to afford not [getting] payments from patients and what will happen to patients who avoid care that they need [but can’t afford to access]?” Given the Republican control of the White House and both parties of Congress, Souza said that they will work closely with the Rhode Island congressional delegation and watching what happens with the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid expansion and the Health Exchange, etc. Making Medicaid patients contribute toward their health care costs and privatizing Medicare, as some Republicans are recommending, would only exacerbate patients’ financial liability, he said.

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