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What happens when hospitals that might seem like statewide competitors team up instead?
Hitinder Gurm, M.D., said, after 25 years, it’s clear that statewide cardiovascular collaborative BMC2, formally known as the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Cardiovascular Consortium, has made all of the providers better. Member hospitals share their data, best practices and lessons learned with each other to improve patient care and reduce health care costs.
“It’s been a great source of partnership and collaboration, with all of us focusing on quality and transparency,” said Gurm, a professor of internal medicine and chief clinical officer at University of Michigan Health’s adult hospitals. Gurm, an interventional cardiologist at U-M Health’s Frankel Cardiovascular Center, also serves as BMC2 program director.
Here, Gurm notes some of the most exciting achievements in the 25 years since the consortium began.
A statewide culture of collaboration
Although BMC2 started as a registry of percutaneous coronary intervention at five hospitals back in the ‘90s, it’s expanded to include all non-federal hospitals in the state conducting PCI procedures to unblock arteries, and more than 85% of hospitals conducting qualifying vascular interventions. The hospitals track outcomes for PCI, vascular surgical procedures and, most recently, transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR, via the Michigan TAVR registry in collaboration with the Michigan Society of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeons.
“There’s something to be said about the entire state working together,” Gurm said. In practice, that looks like 350 interventional cardiologists and 225 vascular specialists all on the same team as their 700,000-plus patients.
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For the last few years, the collaborative has been conducting peer review of blinded cases to find ideas that every provider might be able to take with them.
“There’s really no such thing as the perfect health care system, and what we realized was each hospital is doing important work that can help others,” Gurm said. “I’ve learned from colleagues at the big hospitals and colleagues at the smaller community hospitals. There’s no sense of competition, because everybody wants to do the best for our patients, not just our own patients but also patients elsewhere around Michigan and beyond.”
ALSO FROM BMC2: Smokers needed angioplasty and stenting a decade before non-smokers
Practice-altering insight on reducing contrast in kidney injury
The incidence of many complications in Michigan has declined substantially and the state now performs much better than the country overall on many process measures. One area where the collaborative has generated new knowledge that shaped the care of patients globally is the field of contrast-induced kidney injury.
