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The reason we’re an integrated health care delivery system is so that we take care of
a patient across the spectrum: across age, across locations, across different sorts of
health care problems. And in doing that, we can not only provide better care, but more
cost-effective care. So what we would like to see happen is what we’ve talked about
as value-based reimbursement. Pay us based on delivering high-quality care at an affordable
cost, but do it based on a diagnosis. Do it based on an episode of care across time.
So let me give you a clinical example. So our first care management initiative was to
take pneumonia and reform the way that we deliver that care. If a small group of antibiotics
that we know are the best thing for patients… make sure that our social workers are involved
from the first day that the patient comes to the hospital so that they’re able to
go back to their home when they get better. And make sure we’re responsible in how we
use those resources during delivery of care. So take enough X-rays to know what’s going
on, but don’t take too many X-rays. The result is we reduced the cost of care for
pneumonia and we actually reduced the mortality of pneumonia in the entire state of Wisconsin.