John G. Malcolm
Introduction
Long before I was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Fulton-DeKalb Hospital Authority, which oversees the entire Grady Health System (hereinafter referred to as Grady), I had heard and read, in essence, that Grady hemorrhages money, that it was inefficiently run and mismanaged, and that it was a complete waste of taxpayer dollars. However, in a recently-conducted Strategic Opportunity Assessment, APM Management Consultants, an internationally-recognized health care consulting firm, found that Grady is relatively efficient on a cost per ad- justed discharge basis compared to national and regional institutions and very efficient from a clinical utilization perspective. In other words, APM found that the opportunity to reduce the length of stay of the average patient is surprisingly low for an insti- tution of Gradys size and case complexity. APM also concluded that Gradys cost per adjusted discharge, a benchmark used to assess overall performance by ex- amining the cost of treating each patient admission, was lower than both the local and national averages of other prominent public and private health care providers.
http://www.gppf.org/pub/HealthCare/grady.pdf
By John G. Malcolm
Introduction
Long before I was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Fulton-DeKalb Hospital Authority, which oversees the entire Grady Health System (hereinafter referred to as Grady), I had heard and read, in essence, that Grady hemorrhages money, that it was inefficiently run and mismanaged, and that it was a complete waste of taxpayer dollars. However, in a recently-conducted Strategic Opportunity Assessment, APM Management Consultants, an internationally-recognized health care consulting firm, found that Grady is relatively efficient on a cost per adjusted discharge basis compared to national and regional institutions and very efficient from a clinical utilization perspective. In other words, APM found that the opportunity to reduce the length of stay of the average patient is surprisingly low for an institution of Gradys size and case complexity. APM also concluded that Gradys cost per adjusted discharge, a benchmark used to assess overall performance by examining the cost of treating each patient admission, was lower than both the local and national averages of other prominent public and private health care providers.
http://www.gppf.org/pub/HealthCare/grady.pdf
