Service Lines, Neurology, and Academic Medicine: Departmental Perspectives, Implementation Strategies, and Keys to Success.

Service lines are increasingly common for organizing multidisciplinary patient care. Concerns regarding impacts of neuroscience service lines were voiced at several national neurology department chair summits, prompting the American Academy of Neurology to convene a Service Lines Workgroup. Neurology department leaders nationally at institutions that had created or considered a neuroscience service line were interviewed to elicit their experiences and lessons learned.

Value based care and bundled payments: Anesthesia care costs for outpatient oncology surgery using time-driven activity-based costing.

Background: With the movement towards bundled payments, stakeholders should know the true cost of the care they deliver. Time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) can be used to estimate costs for each episode of care. In this analysis, TDABC is used to both estimate the costs of anesthesia care and identify the primary drivers of those costs of 11 common oncologic outpatient surgical procedures.

Measuring the value of process improvement initiatives in a preoperative assessment center using time-driven activity-based costing.

Background: The value and impact of process improvement initiatives are difficult to quantify. We describe the use of time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) in a clinical setting to quantify the value of process improvements in terms of cost, time and personnel resources.

Problem: Difficulty in identifying and measuring the cost savings of process improvement initiatives in a Preoperative Assessment Center (PAC).