| Intermountain HealthCare shared with HMC KnoweldgeWeb Partners how they overcame previous failures in Induction improvements to achieve lower LOS and significant savings. |
| Janie Wilson, Director, explains how Intermountain HealthCare achieved this success |
 | What challenge did you face?
To achieve in this area the W&N Mission: Clinicians working together with other clinicians, health care administrators, and patients to develop high-quality, cost-efficient medical care for women and newborns by incorporating evidence-based medicine into a program of continuing quality improvement.
This was a W&N corporate-wide board goal for Intermountain Healthcare and involved 18 birthing facilities in Utah (and one in Idaho).
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| What process did you use to achieve this success?
Regarding Elective Induction < 39 weeks:
- National guidelines had been established
- Local consensus that this should not be done
- Data showed that this was a problem
- We addressed obstacles
- Spent a great deal of time educating nurses and doctors
- Tracked progress and reported back results
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| Who was involved in the improvement/change process?
Primarily our nine urban birthing facilities initially. We have added the smaller birthing facilities as they came up on our L&D charting program. |
| What improvements occurred?
We have decreased the volume of elective inductions <39 weeks from 27% in 1999 to about 3% today. This has resulted in a shorter length of stay in L&D (one hour for the system overall for elective inductions; almost 2 hours in some facilities). We have had a significant decrease in elective inductions in nulligravida patients. |
| What is the estimate of costs, FTE's, time, etc., saved?
The cumulative variable costs savings from 2001 to 2005 were $1.4 Million
HMC Partners may read extensive documentation about how these savings were achieved in the HMC KnowledgeWeb. See the IHC Powerpoint on the matter. |
| What will you do differently next time?
We would define the best way to educate/implement and do this consistently across all facilities with L&D staff and providers. We allowed each urban region to implement in their own way, and had very different levels of engagement and outcomes. |
