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CHI St. Vincent’s Chad Aduddell on Curbing Costs by Staying in Touch with Patients

3 min read

Chad Aduddell oversees CHI St. Vincent in Little Rock and all of Catholic Health Initiatives’ organizations and operations in Arkansas. He has 19 years of health care experience.

Before joining St. Vincent, Aduddell was the president of the Bone & Joint Hospital and chair and administrator of the Saints Cardiovascular Institute at St. Anthony Hospital in Oklahoma City. He received his MBA in health care administration from Oklahoma City University-Meinders School of Business.

Aduddell was named interim market CEO for CHI St. Vincent in March.

How can hospitals ensure that customers, i.e., patients, know up front exactly how much hospital services cost?

Our goal around pricing is to develop a clear rationale for how we set the total cost of care and share the information with patients to allow them to make educated decisions on their health care choices. The patient experience is critical to our core value of striving toward excellence, and clear pricing is a significant piece to a consumer’s overall satisfaction.

What has St. Vincent done to curb health care costs?

Our team uses a systematic approach to identify opportunities to improve efficiency and reduce waste from our system while simultaneously improving outcomes.

A good example of this is in our orthopedic program. In partnership with physicians, we have taken an approach with our primary joint replacement patients where we are accountable for the quality and outcomes from their surgeries well after they are discharged from the hospital. We have care managers who reach out to patients well before their surgery and stay in contact with them four months after their surgery to ensure each one has a resource available should they have questions about their surgery and to make sure they receive the appropriate subsequent care. They provide coordinated communication between the surgeons, primary care physicians and other providers all along the way.

The payoff for the patients has been incredible. We have been able to shorten the amount of time the patient spends in the hospital after surgery, reduce the frequency of subsequent readmissions after they go home and improve overall outcomes. We have seen a 15.7 percent decrease in the total cost of care for these patients compared with a couple of years ago. And when looking at benchmarks across the country, our costs are significantly lower than those of other facilities.

How does St. Vincent plan to grow in the next few years?

Recently, there has been quite a bit of consolidation within the health care industry. We believe that trend will continue. With the focus on redesigning health care, the changes in reimbursement and the evolving complexity of our industry, it will become harder to function independently.

We are exploring new partnership opportunities across the state to find synergies with physicians and other health systems as we try to find new ways to work together. Our work with Conway Regional Health System is a good example of this. We are working to finalize an alliance model in the coming months that allows us to partner while still maintaining our independent identities. We believe we can more effectively provide quality care together than we would be able to individually.

How are you dealing with the shift from a volume- to value-based reimbursement system?

We’re developing additional integration between providers, including physicians, hospitals, outpatient services and post-acute providers. We believe our success will be determined by how well we coordinate the care of individuals among all of the different providers.

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