Combating low-value preoperative testing

In this article, originally published by our sister publication, Healthcare Innovation, Contributing Senior Editor David Raths gives an overview of Dr. Lesly Dossett’s recent webinar discussing her work with the Michigan Program for Value Enhancement (MPrOVE), combating low-value preoperative testing. 

Read a snippet of Healthcare Innovation’s article below.

Working to reduce low-value preoperative testing in Michigan

In her work as co-director of the Michigan Program for Value Enhancement (MPrOVE), Lesly Dossett, M.D., M.P.H., has worked to translate value-based research findings into practice at Michigan Medicine and then scale those strategies to other health systems. During a recent Learning Health System Collaboratory webinar, she discussed implementing and disseminating efforts to reduce low-value preoperative testing.

Dossett was introduced by her co-director of MPrOVE, Geoffrey Barnes, M.D., M.Sc., a cardiologist and vascular medicine specialist. He described Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan’s Collaborative Quality Initiatives (CQIs), which are part of a statewide, provider-led, quality improvement program that for over 20 years has linked hospital, clinician, and administrative data to enhance patient safety and, reduce, costly medical complication.

“Many of them are around procedures — cardiac surgery, neurosurgery, back surgery, OB surgery,” Barnes said. “Others are more around healthcare delivery. There's one focused on hospitalizations and another focused on the emergency department. The one I run focuses on anticoagulation care. It's really about how we can bring data together, and bring people together to understand care delivery, to identify best practices that improve that healthcare outcome, and then to disseminate that across as many of the places in the state as possible, and then to use that as a model to demonstrate nationally and beyond, how we can deliver high-quality care.”

“As I think about both what MPrOVE is doing locally within our health system, and what the CQIs are doing at a statewide level, I see a lot of parallels there. I see a lot of opportunity to take data that we have collected, to understand what that data is telling us, and then to try and improve processes,” Barnes added. “Something that we are continuing to work on is how to move out of the individual QI projects into the more structured approaches of learning health systems and implementation science. Whether we're doing that locally within MPrOVE or whether we're doing it at a statewide level, we're trying to move in that direction, recognizing that getting people in place, getting the resources, getting the engagement, is often a little bit of a challenge.”

Dossett, who has served as the Maud T. Lane Research Professor for Cancer Quality Improvement and Chief of the Division of Surgical Oncology at the University of Michigan, was recently appointed the new Chair and Clinical Service Chief for the Department of Surgery at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City. 

During the webinar, she spoke about her work to address low-value preoperative testing. That effort demonstrates some of the ways MPrOVE and the CQIs can work in synergy with each other. 

Visit Healthcare Innovation for the full article.