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How To Determine Quality In Healthcare

Castlight

By Abigail Bassett

Big data is revolutionizing everything from travel to social media. But it has yet to revolutionize the healthcare industry and that’s “crippling American business,” according to Naomi Allen, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Castlight Health.

Allen spoke at the inaugural Castlight Enterprise Healthcare Cloud Summit in New York City, where business leaders and executives gathered to discuss the issue of employer healthcare spending and how to fix it.

“[Healthcare] is one of the last areas of the enterprise that hasn’t been dramatically transformed by a technology platform,” she said. “It’s hard enough to get all of your data in one place, let alone know what to do about it.”

According to Castlight, a technology company focused on enterprise healthcare, American businesses spend as much as $620 billion annually to take care of their employees. Of that, an estimated 30 percent--$180 billion--is lost to healthcare waste.

Castlight assembled a panel of experts including leaders from Aon Hewitt, Cleveland Clinic, Comcast , Consumer Reports, McKinsey and WellPoint to discuss how to tackle healthcare waste and spend. The panel agreed that while transparency and data are key factors in reducing healthcare costs, the question of quality and what it means to all parties involved, remains to be solved.

Shawn Leavitt, Senior Vice President of Global Benefits for Comcast, said that for employees, understanding the definition of quality is crucial.

“When someone talks to [employees] about quality of a physician, they’re like, ‘What does that mean? Is that because they have the newest magazines in the waiting room or because I don’t have to wait in the waiting room?’ There’s really not an understanding of what quality is.”

Quality can’t be measured in blanket terms, either. As Cleveland Clinic CEO, Dr. Toby Cosgrove, stated, “The metrics are different depending upon what your specialty is. The metrics for dermatology are different from the metrics for cardiac surgery.” This in turn makes determining quality that much more complex.

When you add a consumer into the healthcare equation, you add complexity, according to Tara Montgomery, Senior Director of Health Impact at Consumer Reports.

“There are patients with very different levels of awareness and very different levels of engagement. And you can’t just throw one kind of tool at everybody and say, ‘Good luck. We’ve given you the transparency,’” she said. “There is a need to provide kind of a trusted navigator to a diverse set of consumers that include everything from migrant farm workers to employees of Fortune 500 companies.”

Comcast’s Leavitt agreed that both customers and employers need a helping hand.

“Our focus is around, well how are we going to help people transition from the world that we have today,” he said, “to an environment where you actually pay attention to the product that you’re going to receive when you enter that physician’s office?”

“We’ve heard a lot today about the brave new world of all this information that we want consumers to have at their fingertips. The big question is, ‘What do you do with it?’” Leavitt said.

Abigail Bassett is an award-winning New York based freelance writer and producer whose work has appeared in Money Magazine, Fortune, CNN.com and CNBC.com.