Institute on Health Care Costs and Solutions

Work Plan Objectives

• Create a forum(s) to address specific issues that are important to controlling costs.
  
  
• Develop a set of guiding principles to sort out the most useful approaches for business to consider.
  
  
• Identify, analyze and disseminate the most promising practical solutions to the health care cost crisis from the business perspective, using Web technology and new modes of rapid communication and solutions sharing. Broad areas to be evaluated include:
  
  
  • health care strategies that help change the incentives facing employers, employees and patients, including plan design changes;
  • models of care and financing that engage the consumer in more of the choices without "abandoning" them to an imperfect system;
  • highly targeted disease management;
  • consumer empowerment with information and decision support tools;
  • transparency and disclosure of standardized data and metrics, making progress toward a standardized health care reporting system for the non-managed care systems so that purchasers can assess performance and encourage use of the best programs and providers across the whole system, including fee-for-service, PPOs, integrated delivery systems, and other delivery types;
  • improved patient safety and reduction of medical errors;
  
  
  
• identification and dissemination, using Web and Internet technology, of medical treatments and diagnostic testing that are documented empirically to improve net health outcomes; and
  
  
• methods for tying payments to evidence of superior outcomes or to higher volume and other structural measures of quality as proxies for superior outcomes until such metrics are developed and/or available.
  
  
• Use the forums and commissioned papers to develop alternative approaches and the business case for these alternatives, along with analysis of solutions, including how to pay for the explosion of new technologies.
  
  We know that these problems are complex and multifaceted, and our solutions must also recognize that complexity.
  
  
• Research confirms that corporate purchasers who are active managers of their health benefits have medical cost increases lower than those who do nothing. Put another way, as bad as health care costs are, they would be worse if employers did little or nothing to actively manage them. The same can be said about pursuing excellence or Six Sigma standards. We can get closer with sustained, focused effort. Each sub-unit in the work plan is aimed at identifying ways to reduce cost increases by improving quality and empowering customers.
  
  

• Institute Rationale
• Institute Objectives
• Ground Rules
• Guiding Principles