TITLE:
Frugal Innovations Health Care Programs at the Community Level
AUTHORS:
Ronald Lagoe, Shelly Littau
KEYWORDS:
Health Care Costs, Hospital Lengths of Stay, Long Term Care, Hospital Admissions
JOURNAL NAME:
Case Reports in Clinical Medicine,
Vol.7 No.2,
February
27,
2018
ABSTRACT: Recent experience in some countries has suggested that the use of frugal innovations can be valuable. These initiatives can reduce health care expenses by substituting less costly services for more expensive ones and by limiting the organizational costs of maintaining these programs. These approaches have been defined as doing more with less. This study described the use of frugal approaches to improve the efficiency of care by providers in the metropolitan area of Syracuse, New York. In these programs, numbers of hospital patient days were reduced by discharging patients to long term care services. Hospital emergency department utilization was also monitored and managed at the community wide level. The utilization of hospital admissions per population was also limited. The three programs described in this study were implemented with annual staff expenses of $127,000. This amounted to only about $42,000 annually per hospital. The development and use of these frugal innovations was made possible through cooperation among providers and use of a single organization, the Hospital Executive Council to coordinate the programs.