The Leapfrog Group
|
Plan StatusOngoing advocacy and pay-for-performance programs.Number of People CoveredAll those whose health care is subsidized by employers and other large private and public health care purchasers.Estimated CostNot addressed.
Payment Scheme Leapfrog members agree to make health care purchasing decisions based on principles designed to improve quality of health care delivered and to encourage consumer participation. According to Leapfrog, if three of four improvement “leaps” were enacted by all hospitals, then each year more than 65,000 lives would be saved, more than 907,000 errors would be avoided, and up to $41.5 billion in health care costs would be saved. |
 |
Plan in Brief
- The Leapfrog Group is an initiative begun by large employers who recognized that their expenditures on health care did not come with guarantees of quality or positive outcomes.
- The group now represents organizations that purchase health insurance and aims to optimize employers’ purchasing power to drive the health care industry to achieve improvements in health care quality, value, and safety.
- Members represent more than 34 million Americans and more than $62 billion in health care costs.
- The group advocates four “leaps” to improve quality and safety: Computer Physician Order Entry, Evidence-Based Hospital Referral, specialist intensive care unit staffing, and the Leapfrog Safe Practices Score.
|
Impact on Federal Government
- As a health care purchaser, the federal government can benefit from Leapfrog’s initiatives.
Impact on States
- As health care purchasers, states can benefit from Leapfrog’s initiatives. Leapfrog is actively seeking state members with the incentive of reduced fees.
Impact on Insurers
- Leapfrog members agree to require health plans to adhere to the group’s purchasing principles.
Impact on Providers
- Encouraged to provide transparent information via Leapfrog’s surveys and are recognized and rewarded for improvements in quality and safety.
- Supports training of “intensivists”—critical care specialists—to staff intensive care units, a practice linked to improved outcomes.
- Supports evidence-based hospital referral, which would allow purchasers and patients to choose providers with proven success in certain medical procedures.
Impact on Employers
- Leapfrog’s founding principles are designed to optimize employers’ health care purchasing power.
- Leapfrog’s member health care purchasers adhere to purchasing principles: informing employees, using comparative ratings, providing incentives, fostering quality and safety improvement leaps, requiring health plans to adhere to the principles, and fostering support from health care consultants and brokers.
- Leapfrog’s members gain access to data, tools, and forums to enact the principles.
Impact on Individuals
- Supports improved quality of care via various measures, such as incentives for providers to improve quality and safety and evidence-based hospital referral.
- Leapfrog members have vowed to provide enrollees with information about safety, quality, and affordability of health care options and to educate enrollees to compare their options.
- Consumers can easily recognize the measures and their value.
- Leapfrog survey results show individuals how hospitals are implementing Leapfrog’s principles.
Proponents/Opponents
|
Proponents say that making performance measures publicly available stimulates a desire to improve those measures.
|
Critics say that Leapfrog’s reporting is not sufficiently usable and that not enough hospitals participate in the group’s surveys.
|
|
Key Targets for InvestmentHealth IT in the form of Computer Physician Order Entry (CPOE) systems; these systems automate prescriptions and link them to error- prevention software.
Provider improvement programs are eligible for pay-for-performance incentives and rewards.
Notable Feature
- Emphasis on patient safety.
- According to Leapfrog, up to 30% of health care costs arise from poor care, and up to $41.5 billion in health care spending could be saved annually.
- Leapfrog believes its recommended changes can be implemented in the near term and is working with providers to establish implementation plans and dates.
- Leapfrog’s hospital programs currently focus on adult inpatient care.
Experts' Comments“Large employers can play a unique role in the U.S. health care system, using private-sector purchasing approaches to procure health benefits for their employees. Most employers believe that the appropriate use of market forces, such as public disclosure of physician and hospital performance measures, incentives to create price- and quality-sensitive consumers, and rewards for better care, is the optimal way to control costs and improve quality."
-- Robert S. Galvin, Suzanne Delbanco, Arnold Milstein and Greg Belden
Health Affairs, 2005
|
For Further Information
About the Leapfrog Group
Has the Leapfrog Group Had an Impact on the Health Care Market?
Leapfrog Group Hospital Quality and Safety RatingsThe Leapfrog Group: Ready to Jump from Marketplace to Courtroom?
|
|
|
Interest Groups 
