Cost Savings Associated With Implementing 4 Total Joint Replacement Electronic Clinical Quality Measures Nationally: 2020-2040.

Background: Digital transformation using widely available electronic data is a key component to improving health outcomes and customer choice and decreasing cost and measurement burden. Despite these benefits, existing information on the potential cost savings from electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs) is limited.

Methods: We assessed the costs of implementing 4 eCQMs related to total hip and/or total knee arthroplasty into electronic health record systems across healthcare systems in the United States.

Association of Commercial-to-Medicare Relative Prices With Health System Financial Performance.

Importance: Various studies have documented the rise in commercial insurance prices during the past 2 decades; however, estimates on the association of rising costs with health systems' financial health are lacking. This study calculated 2 measures from standardized Audited Financial Statements (AFSs)-operating margins and days of unrestricted cash on hand-to explore the associations.

Objective: To estimate the association between health systems' financial condition and the ratio of commercial to Medicare relative prices.

Testing of a Risk-Standardized Major Bleeding and Venous Thromboembolism Electronic Clinical Quality Measure for Elective Total Hip and/or Knee Arthroplasties.

Brigham and Women's Hospital has received funding from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to develop a novel electronic clinical quality measure to assess the risk-standardized major bleeding and venous thromboembolism (VTE) rate following elective total hip and/or knee arthroplasty. There are currently no existing measures that evaluate both the bleeding and VTE events following joint arthroplasty (TJA). Our novel composite measure was tested within two academic health systems with 17 clinician groups meeting the inclusion criteria.

Testing of a Risk-Standardized Complication Rate Electronic Clinical Quality Measure (eCQM) for Total Hip and/or Total Knee Arthroplasty.

Supported by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) has retooled the existing claims-based measures NQF1550 and NQF3493 into an electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) to assess the risk-standardized complication rate (RSCR) following elective primary total hip (THA) and knee arthroplasty (TKA) at the clinician group level. This novel eCQM includes risk-adjustment for social determinants of health, includes all adult patients from all payers, leverages electronic health records (EHRs) rather than claims-based data, and includes both inpatient and outpatient procedures and complications which offers benefits compared to existing metrics. Following testing in two geographically different healthcare systems, the overall risk-standardized complication rate within 90 days following THA and TKA at the two sites was 3.

Association of a High-Efficiency Particulate Air Filter COVID-19 Testing Booth With Testing Capacity, Cost Per Test Acquired, and Use of Personal Protective Equipment.

This quality improvement study compares COVID-19 testing throughput, personal protective equipment use, and cost per test before vs after the introduction of high-efficiency particulate air–filtered, positive-pressure Hexapod personal protection booths at a hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.