How to improve the quality of care through LOGEX’s & SAZ’s value-driven care program
About the client
The Vereniging van Samenwerkende Algemene Ziekenhuizen (Association of Collaborating General Hospitals), or SAZ, comprises 28 general hospitals in the Netherlands. SAZ’s mission is to provide high-quality, comprehensive, and affordable care for its patients. Part of this involves learning from each other and leveraging collaboration to uplift residents’ care and quality of life in the region.
The challenge
SAZ wanted to facilitate best practice sharing among its hospitals. They wanted to make it as easy as possible for the hospitals within their network to share their outcome and cost data around patient groups in a comparable way, without additional registration burden, while complying with all regulations, incl GDPR.
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We wanted to give our medical professionals insight into the outcomes and costs of our patients without increasing the already heavy registration burden.
Dutch Association of Cooperating Hospitals (SAZ)
The solution
The SAZ hospitals, together with LOGEX, created its ‘value-driven care’ program. The program started with two patient groups and is adding new patient groups every year. Currently, there are programs for colorectal cancer, hip fracture, breast cancer, inguinal hernia, cholecystectomy, pregnancy and childbirth, heart failure.
LOGEX, in close collaboration with the SAZ program team, enables hospitals in SAZ’s network to:
- Gain insight into outcomes and costs for a specific patient group without collecting any new data: with the explicit consent of the participating hospitals, LOGEX uses existing data from Dutch quality registries (such as from DICA and Perined), and information on processes and cost, from claims and financial data.
- Compare outcome and cost performance over time and against other participating hospitals, visualised in a dashboard, revealing improvement potential.
- Dive deeper into patient-level data to assess the reason behind certain scores while complying with GDPR standards by showing only aggregated subsets not traceable directly to individual patients.
- Discuss results transparently and openly with other medical professionals from peer hospitals via joint reflection sessions organised for every patient group every six months.
- Learn from best practices and initiate improvement efforts from conversations on shared insights.
The impact
The program quickly led to success for the SAZ network, and all participating hospitals benefited from improvements in their performance:
- Great enthusiasm and active best practice sharing: doctors, nurses, obstetricians, paramedics, and program managers actively participate in reflection sessions (digitally during Covid-19), which has led to working visits between hospitals to learn from each other.
- Highly rated reflection sessions: 8 or higher, with 20-40% giving a 9 or a 10 (out of 10).
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