By Paul Levy

A dramatic cease-fire was announced over the weekend. No, not the one
in the Mideast, but rather in the health care market in Massachusetts.
As documented in this Boston Globe story
by Scott Allen and Jeff Krasner, Tufts Medical Center and Blue Cross
Blue Shield of MA reached an agreement on a payment contract. What's
the big deal? Well, Tufts had threatened to pull out of the BCBS
network when it felt that it was not being offered sufficient
compensation for its medical services.

The context was important. The Globe had previously reported
that payments to Tufts and its doctors were substantially below those
received by, in particular, the hospitals and doctors in the Partners
Healthcare System, and often below those received by BIDMC and its
doctors. As I have noted below,
there is really no justification for these differentials, if one
considers the actual quality of care delivered by the major academic
medical centers.

Well, I guess Tufts felt that enough was enough and stood its ground
in its contract negotiations with BCBS. This was a gutsy move, in that
BCBS has more subscribers than all the other insurance companies
combined, and Tufts and its doctors stood to lose a lot of business if
the dispute was not resolved.

We should all be pleased that the
issue was settled, apparently to the satisfaction of both parties. It
is difficult to believe that Tufts could have followed this path absent
the Boston Globe stories, in that those stories created the moral high
ground for a different kind of negotiation. After all, there is no data
to support the contention that a patient at MGH or Brigham and Women's
Hospital will receive better care than at Tufts.

But where does
that leave the state? On its face, the Tufts-BCBS deal seems to
contradict the hopes of Governor Deval Patrick, who, it is reported,
wants the hospitals and insurers to slow down the growth rate in health
care premiums. BCBS, for its part, has been pursing adoption of a
capitated insurance reimbursement approach to control those costs, and
adoption of that plan was announced as part of the Tufts deal. But
clearly some compromise must have been reached. The plan offered to
Tufts had to be more generous than the one previously offered, or the
deal would not have been done.

We have been discussing this
alternative contract idea with BCBS for several months, too, and both
parties are trying to figure out how it might be designed to work in
the environment of our medical center and our physicians. One key issue
is that such a plan transfers a portion of the insurance risk of health
care to the providers and away from the insurance company. Some element
of this risk-sharing is probably essential to align incentives between
the providers and the insurer, but the specific design and
implementation plan is important, lest the hospital and doctors find
themselves with a major revenue loss at the end of any given year.
After all, providers do not have the kind of financial reserves that
insurance companies have.

Another important issue is that we do
not control the delivery of the full spectrum of care, from primary
care to hospitalization to skilled nursing facilities. A capitated
contract requires some kind of relationship among providers across that
spectrum, so that risk can be appropriately monitored and shared.

Nonetheless,
people of good will can work through these issues, and I am hopeful
that we can, too. In the meantime, as I have noted often on these
pages, there are many steps that hospitals and doctors can take in the
current fee-for-service reimbursement environment that also help to
control cost increases. My passion for reducing harm that you have seen
repeatedly on these pages is an important part of that process. See
below, for example, the post about reducing ventilator associated pneumonia.
That program not only saved lives: It saved millions of dollars in
medical costs. That most of the savings went to the insurance companies
did not preclude us from adopting this standard of care. Our job,
simply, was to reduce harm and save lives.

As you can tell from my post below,
I am frustrated that the medical profession in this city has not
adopted an aggressive and transparent approach to this kind of quality
improvement. As noted by one or more comments under that post, in its
delays, the profession risks abdication on these matters to
governmental authorities, who will impose standards that will
inevitably lack the subtlety and effectiveness of those that the
profession could otherwise design for itself.

Also, on these pages you have seen an emphasis on BIDMC Spirit,
our process improvement program based on the Toyota production system.
We engaged in this program to improve the work environment for our
staff and to improve patient care, but it also has the effect of
controlling costs and improving efficiency. Again, a great portion of
the cost savings will flow through to the insurance companies, but we
still pursue the effort because of its advantages to the organization.
I want to acknowledge here that our progress on the front was greatly
aided by technical support and assistance from BCBS, as part of a pilot
program involving five hospitals in the state. The program gave us
exposure to people and ideas and resources that we might have
encountered otherwise, but that probably would have been delayed by
several years.

As a result of these joint efforts with BCBS and
with other helpful people like the Institute for Healthcare
Improvement, we find ourselves to be in the vanguard with others around
the country in the implementation of these approaches. Through this
blog and other presentations, we are doing our best to share what we
have learned. As I have often stressed, quality and process improvement and transparency is not a matter of gaining competitive advantage.

As
long as the distribution of health care reimbursement revenues is
viewed as a zero sum game, the likelihood of cooperation across the
hospital and medical community is likely to be minimal. If Tufts
Medical Center got more, must everyone else get less? No. My hope is
that the presentations here and elsewhere of what we and others have
learned will help people understand that it is not a zero sum game.
Society as a whole can benefit from the kinds of quality and safety and
other process improvements with which we have been experimenting. But
we need all participants to shed their defensiveness and fear of
disclosure, to acknowledge the areas needing improvement, and to share
what they have learned for the greater good.

Paul Levy is the President and CEO of Beth Israel Deconess Medical
Center in Boston. He blogs about his
experiences at, Running a Hospital, one of the few blogs we know of maintained by a senior hospital executive.