To Improve, It Must Be Measured!

Amar Deshwar, M.D. 

Resident in Emergency Medicine 

Brigham and Women's Hospital/Massachusetts General Hospital

PGY 2

06/01/2021

Amar Deshwar, M.D. 

I recently was fortunate enough to participate in the Zoom edition of the Value Based Healthcare Delivery course. A large portion of the course involved case studies of different hospital systems tackling their toughest problems. If you were to ask anyone, individual physicians and hospital systems included, if they wanted to improve patient safety, drive down costs and raise profits my guess is that they would all say of course! But what are they doing to make this happen?

For me, this the point that I will take from having been a part of this course: being able to precisely measure an outcome is the first step towards improving it. This sounds so simple and yet seemed to be the key realization of the majority of these cases in turning around their respective projects. Everyone agrees that healthcare is too expensive and yet determining how much it costs to provide care for an individual’s hospital stay is still evasive. 

For me as an emergency resident in training I think there are many takeaways from this. I hope to be able to translate this into my own practice by tracking the procedures that I perform and having regular evaluations of their various outcomes, as well as accounting and comparing the costs for patients that I see that end up being admitted from the ED to the ICU, the floor or to ED Observation units.