A July 7 hearing before the Assembly Health Committee at the State Capitol provided WHA an opportunity, once again, to emphasize the leading role that hospitals are taking to ensure that the public has access to timely and accurate health care data.

WHA President Steve Brenton testified that the industry is responding to the Legislature and the public’s need for more information. "You called upon health care providers to be more engaged with and responsive to patients and employers – WE HEARD YOU," Brenton said.

The Valued Voice (May 21, 2004) reported that Assembly Health Committee Chair, Rep. Gregg Underheim (R-Oshkosh) earlier that month proposed three new bills that would result in the addition of new data mandates, new compliance requirements and the creation of a new level of bureaucracy. Specifically, two of the proposals mandate public reporting of hospital data, including readmission rates and compliance with the Leapfrog safety standards. The third proposal requires hospitals to publish estimates of charges to patients and creates a new bureaucratic review process when bills exceed the initial estimate. (For more specific information on these proposals, view the legislative counsel summaries on WHA’s Web site at www.wha.org/governmentRelations/pdf/datamandates5-13-04.pdf). Largely ignoring the flourishing efforts of the private sector, Rep. Underheim has proposed these bill drafts under the guise of calling for more transparency in the health care industry.

Ranking Democrat on the Assembly Health Committee and physician, Rep. Sheldon Wasserman (D-Milwaukee) disagreed with the premise behind Rep. Underheim’s proposals and publicly applauded the efforts of WHA’s CheckPointSM and Information Center and the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality. Rep. Wasserman went so far as to suggest that "money spent on physician office visit data (POVD) development by the state would be better spent going toward expanding the CheckPoint and Collaborative initiatives."

At the hearing, Brenton explained how the transfer of hospital data reporting from the Bureau of Health Information (BHI) to the WHA Information Center (WHAIC) has resulted in substantial savings and earlier release of the information.

Over the last 16 months, the successful development and launch of private sector initiatives like CheckPoint, the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality and WHAIC were developed to assist health care purchasers and consumers with their health care decision-making by providing the tools to access valuable quality, safety and price information in a user-friendly format.

Andy Kosseff, MD, Medical Director of Clinical Systems Improvement for SSM Health Care, testified in opposition to the proposals detailing specific problems with each of the proposals, including using Leapfrog measures as a standard measurement when other measures are more widely accepted across the health care industry. He also explained the difficulties associated with forcing all hospitals in Wisconsin to comply with Leapfrog measures and the problems that hospitals will encounter if they are required to report their readmission rates.

James Buchen, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC), testified that WMC in large part, is pleased with the direction the private sector initiatives like CheckPoint and the Collaborative are going with regard to getting more information out so businesses can make better health care decisions. Buchen explained that these initiatives have started to enable businesses to design more cost effective plans for their employees.

Testifying or registering in support of the Underheim initiatives were representatives from AARP, Leapfrog, Wisconsin Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, Wisconsin Association of Health and Life Insurers and the Business Health Care Group of SE Wisconsin. Representatives from Humana and WPS Insurance also testified about the general need to get out more information about health care data in the marketplace.

"This lengthy hearing provided WHA with another opportunity to demonstrate how the private sector is working absent government mandates or increased bureaucracy by forging partnerships that produce meaningful results without wasting precious taxpayer dollars like previous state sponsored efforts have," Brenton said.

Included in this week’s packet is a nomination form for the 2004 Global Vision Community Partnership Award. This competitive grant award is presented to a community health initiative that successfully addresses a documented community health need. The Award, launched by the WHA Foundation in 1993, seeks to recognize and support ongoing projects that support community health.

Any WHA member can nominate a community health project. The project must have been in existence for a minimum of two years and must be a collaborative or partnership project that includes a WHA member hospital and an organization(s) within the community.

"Our members are participating in many collaborative programs within their communities. This award recognizes those programs, shares the wealth of knowledge gained from those programs and provides an unrestricted grant to support the program," said Ann Lucas, WHA foundation director.

The Award will be presented at the WHA Annual Meeting on September 16, 2004. Nominations are due August 27, 2004. Nomination forms can be located on the WHA Web site at www.wha.org. For more information about the award, contact Ann Lucas at alucas@wha.org or 608-274-1820.

July 14 - Current Modifier Reporting Requirements...Are You Keeping Up?
9am - 4pm, Hotel Mead, Wisconsin Rapids

July 15 - The Public Relations Primer
9am - 4pm, Hotel Mead, Wisconsin Rapids

July 30 - Health Care Budgeting & Financial Management for Non-Financial Managers
8:30am - 4:30pm, Holiday Inn, Stevens Point

Paul Del Uomo, president and CEO at Covenant Healthcare System announced that Ron Groepper is the new president of St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Milwaukee. Groepper now serves as chief operating officer of St. John’s Hospital in Springfield, Illinois, a 731-bed teaching hospital that is the flagship of the Hospital Sisters Healthcare System, which operates 13 hospitals.

Prior to joining St. John’s, Groepper served as executive vice president of Bryan/LGH Health System in Lincoln, Nebraska and eight years as executive vice president/chief operating officer of Lincoln General Hospital. He had worked at Lincoln General in various roles since 1980. Groepper began his career as a registered nurse for St. Luke’s Medical Center Intensive Care Unit in 1978 in Sioux City, Iowa.

Groepper received his RN degree from St. Luke’s School of Nursing in Sioux City in 1978, his Bachelor of Arts degree in Business Administration from Briar Cliff College in Sioux City in 1980, and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in 1983.

Historically, stocks, bonds and cash investments have performed differently under the same set of economic conditions. Because of these differences in performance, a retirement savings plan should include all three categories to give plan participants the variety of investment options they may need to build their retirement savings.

Investment diversification is another factor your plan should accommodate. Plan participants are generally responsible for the diversification of their individual accounts, but the plan fiduciary should consider complying with ERISA Section 404(c), which provides guidelines regarding diversification.

Although compliance is optional, ERISA Section 404(c) gives plan participants the assurance that diversified options are built into the plan. It also provides plan fiduciaries with some relief from certain fiduciary obligations.

Read the entire article in Solutions Spotlight, included in this week’s packet or contact David Cutler at dcutler@wha.org or 800-362-7121.

Over the past two years, Wisconsin has become as a national leader in the emergence of what have largely been private sector-led initiatives aimed at enabling consumerism while meeting a commitment to public accountability. This private sector approach has largely been embraced by policy leaders, purchasers and consumers as a welcome development in pursuing common health care cost and access goals.

What is different about these efforts? They are founded on the principles of collaboration – health care purchasers and providers working together to make things happen. It is this approach and perspective that is yielding results and turning heads towards Wisconsin.

In recent years, the Legislature has provided much of the motivation for this information revolution. You called upon health care providers to be more engaged with and responsive to patients and employers – WE HEARD YOU. The private sector, through employer-provider partnerships, is making tremendous progress in health care information. In fact, I will suggest that these partnerships have produced more meaningful and useable data in just 16 months than other programs have produced in the last decade.

What we must not do is repeat what are increasingly appearing to be mistakes from the past. We have seen the results of one-size-fits-all health care data mandates crafted in a hardball political process with unilateral buy-in and acceptance. The results are programs that, at best, become stagnant, and at worst produce little, if anything, for health care consumers.

The Wisconsin Hospital Association understands that these significant accomplishments, to date, are only the first steps on what will be a long journey toward a reformed delivery and payment environment. Our pledge is to help maintain Wisconsin’s leadership position by continuing to push proactive solutions and collaborate with likeminded stakeholders.

WHA corporate member HGA recently was recognized for its design of the Hudson Medical Center, which was named to the Minnesota Physician’s 2004 Architecture & Design Honor Roll. M.A. Mortenson, also a WHA corporate member, served as the contractor for the project.

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