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New York, NY (February 7, 2014) — According to a study by the Institute of Medicine1, the U.S. medical system wastes $750 billion a year. Much of this waste is caused by patient management that does not follow evidence-based guidelines. In an environment of declining reimbursements, hospitals have an opportunity to improve their patient outcomes and financial performance by improving adherence to the evidence and reducing variance in patient care. To help hospitals achieve this goal, Kaplan Health, a leading provider of medical education, and QURE Healthcare, a company that uses Clinical Performance and Value (CPV®) vignettes to measure and change clinical practice, have formed a partnership to provide measurement and education that improves the quality of care, while reducing costs and improving patient outcomes. The partnership is part of Kaplan Health’s new Kaplan Clinical line of offerings.
CPV® vignettes, developed and validated by QURE, are on-line patient cases that combine benchmarking with medical education. QURE provides practitioners with personalized feedback that engages physicians around difficult subjects without placing any administrative burden on the hospital. The intervention is repeated 6 times over 2 years. CPV® vignettes are the only tool that has been shown to accurately measure clinical practice2 and were also shown, in an NIH-funded study, to improve physician adherence to evidence-based guidelines and to achieve a 9% improvement in the health status of patients whose physicians participated.
“In today’s environment, where all healthcare providers are becoming increasingly responsible for their performance and the costs of those actions, we need new and effective educational tools that encourage behavior change in a non-penalizing way,” said Dr. John Peabody, QURE’s founder and president. “We’ve learned that conferences and passive learning methods are not effective in altering clinical behavior. Hospitals will need simple plug-and-play educational tools that will ensure that their providers adhere to clinical protocols, while helping them understand broader elements such as care coordination.”
“Kaplan has been a leader in medical education for over 40 years, so partnering with QURE Healthcare to offer hospitals this effective, patient-outcome driven product is a natural fit,” said Greg Samios, president of Kaplan Health programs. “We look forward to working with hospitals to reduce their costs, while at the same time improving the quality of care they provide to their patients.”
1. Institute of Medicine, “Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America,” September 6, 2012.http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2012/Best-Care-at-Lower-Cost-The-Path-to-Continuously-Learning-Health-Care-in-America/Report-Brief.aspx
2. Peabody JW, Luck J, Glassman P, Jain S, Spell M and Hansen J. “A Prospective Multi-Site Evaluation of Vignettes: Validating an Innovative Method for Measuring the Quality of Physician Practice.” Annals of Internal Medicine, 141(10):771-80, 2004.
About Kaplan Test Prep
Kaplan Test Prep (www.kaptest.com) is a premier provider of educational and career services for individuals, schools and businesses. Established in 1938, Kaplan is the world leader in the test prep industry. With a comprehensive menu of online offerings as well as a complete array of print books and digital products, Kaplan offers preparation for more than 90 standardized tests, including entrance exams for secondary school, college and graduate school, as well as professional licensing exams for attorneys, physicians and nurses. Kaplan also provides private tutoring and graduate admissions consulting services.
About QURE Healthcare
QURE Healthcare (www.qurehealthcare.com) is a research and business firm committed to improving the quality of clinical care. QURE uses its proprietary technology, CPV® (Clinical Performance and Value) vignettes, to evaluate clinical practice and cost-effectiveness of healthcare services at the level of physicians or health care providers. CPV® vignettes are used in health systems in the US and over 30 countries worldwide. Core services include CPV® studies, health economic analyses, and physician-level data collection. The ease, validity and affordability of CPV® vignettes attract a wide array of clients: payers, hospital systems, life sciences and medical technology companies, medical licensing and education institutions as well as international health development organizations.
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