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Data Collection and Measurement

Next Reply: Re:National Benchmarks
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Post National Benchmarks
Author: slwillma
Date: Sep 25, 2008 6:13 pm
My healthcare system is looking to develop a few system-wide quality indicators for our palliative care programs.We are considering tracking pain or symptom control and ICU daily costs pre and post consult.I have not been able to find any benchmarking data to compare our results against.Do they exist? Is there benchmarking data for any of the palliative care quality measures recommended by CAPC?
Any help would be appreciated.
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+ Re:National Benchmarks (by jbcassel on 10/07/2008)
To my knowledge there is not any such data pre- and post- PC consult which would serve as a benchmark. There have certainly been publications which may provide you with some contextual data, but not benchmarks per se. The 8-hospital study by Morrison et al. published Sept 2008 in Archives of Internal Medicine can provide you with such contextual data (but not pre- versus post- consult ICU costs per se). White et al 2006 in the Journal of Healthcare Management provided pre- and post direct costs for ICU patients transferred to a PC unit, but that was just one hospital. The UHC benchmarking studies of patients who may be PC-appropriate measured quality aspects at the beginning of the admissions, but not comparing quality pre- and post-PC-consult. The Dartmouth Health Atlas provides benchmark data at the institutional or regional or state level, including utilization of the ICU, but not pre- and post- PC. The good news is that when you have multiple programs in a health system such as yours, you can benchmark internally rather than externally. This would be true of quality measures as well as ICU direct costs or ICU days or deaths in the ICU (all three are good measures of ICU utilization). Let me know what you think. - Brian Cassel, VCU Massey PCLC.

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