I looked down the line of stories trending on my Xfinity home page and saw one on how a hospital was holding down costs. Hospital costs being a topic of much interest to me, I clicked on the news item. To my surprise, the hospital getting national attention turned out to be none other than University Hospital, right here in Salt Lake City.
Listening to it once, but not absorbing it, I did some Facebooking and news reading, then attempted to come back to the story later. But, it was gone. The Xfinity page no longer featured it, and I couldn't find it with a word search.
But, I did find a story, from back in September, from the New York Times. It quoted Michael Porter, an economist at Harvard School of Business, as saying University Hospital's program was making, "epic progress," and I assume that means epic progress in the effort to reduce hospital costs.
It noted the secretary of health and human services, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, came to Salt Lake in August to see what is being done.
The CEO at the hospital, Dr. Vivian Lee, has set in motion a program in which a computer program has 200 million rows accounting for the various possible expenses -- medicines, tests, personnel time, etc.
Then, they look at what procedures and things are taking place, and question whether they are needed. For example, they've found so much unnecessary blood work was being done, patients were actually getting anemic. So, they cut back, saving the hospital $200 million a year.
Since starting the program, the cost of hospital care has actually been slightly reduced, dropping 0.5 percent, while other area academic hospitals have increased 2.9 percent a year.
I don't know if the hospital will continue to bend expenses down. That would be wonderful. Hopefully, we can check in on University Hospital's program, again, in the future.
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