WASHINGTON – The Department of Health and Human Services has launched two programs aimed at improving healthcare and reducing costs. Both rely heavily on healthcare IT.
 

The Partners for Patients initiative will use data to inform doctors of best practices. It will also provide incentives for Medicare physicians who reduce medical errors, according to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. The Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program, for the first time, will pay hospitals participating in

Medicare for quality, rather than quantity of care, Sebelius said.
 

Sorrel King, a patient advocate who lost a child because of medical errors, said medical errors cause the same number of deaths as a jumbo jet crashing every day, yet not enough has been done to fix the problem. "We cannot keep going at the pace we've been going," she said at an April 12 press conference.
HHS will invest $1 billion in the Partners for Patients program, which initially will target cutting hospital-acquired infections in Medicare patients by 40 percent and hospital readmissions by 20 percent over the next three years, Sebelius said.
 

The program will also ask hospitals to focus on nine types of medical errors and complications, including adverse drug reactions, pressure ulcers, childbirth complications and surgical site infections, she said.
 

Partners for Patients could save up to $50 billion in costs associated with prevented medical errors and help save 60,000 lives over the next three years, according to Sebelius.
 

Donald Berwick, MD, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the program is not about blaming providers for medical errors, but about supporting them with data on best practices. "The workforce is not the problem," he said.
 

The Business Roundtable supports the new Partners for Patients program. David Cote, CEO of Honeywell and a Business Roundtable member, said, "We think this could be huge."
Cote predicted there would be "howls of protest" from providers over the need for metrics, though they're "an essential part of the process."
 

Rich Umbdenstock, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, said the AHA is committed to the new program. "The AHA will be an active partner with HHS in this effort and we will spotlight best practices and share them broadly with the field and link them to the assistance HHS is making available," he said.