Collaboration. Quality. What does CQI really mean?
What if your doctor and your insurance company worked together to bring you the best care while also saving money?
At Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, we’re doing just that.
It’s called Collaborative Quality Initiatives or CQI. It’s all about working with doctors and hospitals to manage costs while improving the quality of care for your employees.
“I think this whole idea of collaborative quality improvement is really important,” said Dr. Darrell Campbell Jr., leader of the Michigan Surgical Quality Collaborative, a program that measures and improves the care of surgical patients throughout the state. “We found out that it works. And I would like to see it propagate throughout the rest of the country and other areas…This idea of regional collaboration is a very powerful one."
Just how powerful? From 2009 to 2010, this program produced $85.9 million in savings statewide along with results like:
- 18 percent fewer surgical-site infections
- 15 percent shorter hospital stays
Collaboration improves quality
For more than a decade, our CQI programs have collected, shared and analyzed information about the most common and costly areas of medical care.
Through our 12 CQI programs, we collaborate with 73 Michigan hospitals representing more than 11,000 doctors and numerous other health care professionals. We collect data from nearly 200,000 patients across the state annually.
What we learn from this data helps doctors and hospitals make changes that can have a real impact on improving patient care.
Taking best practices to heart
The very first CQI program launched by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan was designed to improve care for patients with coronary disease who need angioplasty.
Today, the Cardiovascular Consortium—Percutaneous Coronary Intervention program continues to collect data from about 25,000 artery-clearing angioplasties each year.
With this data, they create best practices to improve the care of angioplasty patients at risk of serious complications like kidney damage, blood transfusions or open-heart surgery.
This program has saved $102 million statewide in three years’ time and produced results like:
- 20 percent fewer hospital deaths
- 38 percent fewer kidney damage complications
- 38 percent fewer blood transfusions needed after angioplasty
- 44 percent fewer vascular complications
With results like these, it's easy to see how Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan is the smart choice for businesses. Through the Collaborative Quality Initiatives program, we work with doctors and hospitals to manage costs while making medical procedures safer and more efficient.
It all adds up to quality health care that can help your business and your employees succeed.
Having an infrastructure in a regional way that we can share information and essentially improve things for everybody has really been a unique situation for me, and I think it's the wave of the future for how we could actually implement real changes in medicine.
Darrell Campbell Jr., M.D., Michigan Surgical Quality Collaborative
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