Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to speak about a report that was released by the Centers for Disease Control, which I think is instructive for the American health care system. We are currently in a process of change in health care. Changing the way health care is delivered in our country is going to take years of hard work, of experimentation, and of learning. There are stakeholders on both the Federal and State level who are out there right now, working to implement models of care that increase the coordination and efficiency with which health care is delivered, improve the quality of the care that is delivered, improve the outcomes that patients experience, and control costs–bring down costs. This delivery system reform is the real issue of health care reform in our time. I emphasize, it is a win-win for system–improving the quality of care while lowering the cost for the system.
This report, called “Vital Signs,” released this week by the Centers for Disease Control, illustrates how just one type of quality reform, reducing hospital-acquired infections, has already improved health outcomes and resulted in significant cost savings. Hospital-acquired infections are a tragic reality of our health care system. Nearly 1 in every 20 hospitalized patients in the United States is affected by a hospital-acquired infection each year. The most deadly of these infections occurs when a tube inserted into a patient’s vein is either not put in properly or not kept clean. Bloodstream infections resulting from these tubes–what are called central line infections–kill as many as 1 in 4 patients who become infected.
I suspect, if we sat all the Members of the Senate down, there would be very few of us who could not identify a friend, a loved one, a family member, somebody we knew who had been exposed to a hospital-acquired infection.
The deaths from hospital-acquired infections are not only numerous but tragic and particularly tragic because they are largely preventable. These are what should be considered a zero event.
Studies have shown that when providers follow a strict checklist of very basic instructions, including things as simple as washing your hands with soap, cleaning a patient’s skin with antiseptic, and placing full sterile drapes over the patient, those rates of hospital-acquired infection plummet.
The CDC’s “Vital Signs” report is further evidence of how effective these guidelines are at reducing and in some cases nearly eliminating central line bloodstream infections from intensive care units. The report’s findings show that from 2001 to 2009, State and Federal efforts to promote and adopt CDC guidelines and best practices for preventing hospital-acquired infections contributed to a 58-percent decrease in the number of central line bloodstream infections among ICU patients–58percent decrease in just 8 years, from 2001 to 2009.
A percentage is a fine thing, it is a statistic, but it does not have a lot of meat on its bones. What does this 58 percent mean? It represents up to 27,000 lives saved, 27,000 families who got their loved one home from the hospital instead of having that terrible conversation with the doctor, explaining to them why their loved one passed away. If that were not enough, it also represents approximately $1.8 billion in cost savings to our health care system–27,000 lives and $1.8 billion saved from reductions in just one type of hospital-acquired infection in just one type of care setting.
The promising news from the CDC report is that the steps health care providers are taking to prevent this type of infection are working. The bad news is, we are not doing enough to reduce the occurrence of bloodstream infections in other health care settings. The report found that in 2009, approximately 60,000 central line bloodstream infections occurred in nonintensive care unit settings such as hospital wards or kidney dialysis clinics. This should not be acceptable to us, especially given the tools we know we have to prevent these infections from happening.
Simply put, we can do better. We can save more lives. We can improve the quality of care people receive and, in the process, save billions of dollars in our health care system. The CDC is already working to support partnerships between health care providers to more broadly implement these now-proven quality reforms. This is a good start.
In my home State, I have very proudly watched the Rhode Island Intensive Care Unit Collaborative, a partnership of health care stakeholders led by an organization called the Rhode Island Quality Institute, take the lead in implementing similar quality reforms to reduce the rate of hospital-acquired infections in our intensive care units. Rhode Island is the only State in the country to have 100 percent of its adult intensive care units participating in a collaborative of this kind, and I commend it to any one of my colleagues. It began years ago in Michigan with the Keystone Project and it spread across the country to the Pronovost principles, and in Rhode Island we have run with it. It has only been a few years, but the results, much like those reported by the CDC, are eye-opening. I will quantify this by saying we began with very first-rate hospitals in Rhode Island. We are in that high-tech Northeast corridor. We are near the Boston medical centers, so we are starting from a very high base of care in Rhode Island hospitals. But even from that good base, the collaborative reported significant improvements in two types of deadly infections: central line bloodstream infections and pneumonia, among patients on ventilators.
The collaborative estimates from 2007 to June 2010, just over 7 years, the effort had saved 73 intensive care unit lives–73 lives of intensive care unit patients–it eliminated the need for over 3,200 expensive hospital days, and it saved hospitals, patients, and insurers $11.5million.
This evidence underscores the potential for similar types of delivery system reforms which, by improving the quality of care, lower the cost. An array of different strategies can lead to these savings, quality reforms such as this that avoid errors and adverse consequences; prevention programs that save lives and money by getting in there before the disease takes off; a robust health information infrastructure that allows for safer and better coordinated care between your primary health care provider, your specialists, your imaging place, the laboratory, the hospital where you had to be admitted; payment policies that reward better results, not just more procedures; and, finally, better administrative efficiency so more health care dollars actually go to health care instead of being burned up on bureaucracies and battles over who gets paid and all the rest that weighs down our health care system.
The President’s Council of Economic Advisers noted recently that up to 30 percent of health care costs, or about 5 percent of GDP, could be saved without compromising health outcomes. Five percent of GDP is around $700 billion. Mr. President, $700 billion a year saved through this kind of win-win is a target worth fighting hard to achieve. I agree with the Council’s observation, but from my experience, I think we can achieve these savings not just without compromising health outcomes, I think we can achieve these savings while improving health outcomes.
Implementing these reforms and achieving these reforms will not be easy. It is not just flipping a switch, it is a journey and that journey will have turns and it will have obstacles. It is a process, as very expert reviewers have said, of learning, of experimentation, of adaptation. But we have been down paths such as that before with great success, and the evidence I presented today shows how well it can work in health care.
So I urge my colleagues, I urge the administration and State leaders to continue working together in all of these areas to make reforming our health care delivery system a priority. The future of our health care system and the good health of our constituents and the good health of our country’s fisc all depend on it.
I will conclude by saying something I have said before, which is that I give great credit to the Obama administration for working in this area. I believe our health care reform bill put every possible pilot, experiment program, and model for testing these different types of delivery reform systems on the table. Very expert reviewers have looked at it and said: I cannot think of a thing they did not try. Everything is in there. On top of that, the Obama administration has put first-rate people who really get this side of the equation, people such as Don Berwick and David Blumenthal, in charge. So a lot of very good things have lined up to take full advantage of these kinds of win-win savings.
The only thing that I think is missing is that the administration has not yet set a hard goal for itself to hit. It still talks about bending the health care cost curve. Well, fine, but that is not a measurable goal.
We are coming up on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the Moon. Way back then, when we feared losing the space race to the Soviet Union, if the President of the United States had said: I am committed to bending the curve of the rate of America’s space exploration, that would have been an unmemorable and an ineffective Presidential intervention. Instead, President Kennedy put a hard benchmark out there that everybody in the world would know we had failed at if we missed it. That was to put a man on the Moon within a decade and bring him home safely. We did not know then how we could do it. We believed we could. We are optimists. We are innovators.
This is a country of innovation and of the “big idea.” By putting that marker out there, President Kennedy drove what was then a smaller Federal bureaucracy toward that goal. I believe we need an equally specific goal from the administration on this front in order to make sure our considerably larger Federal bureaucracy is fully purposed toward achieving that because the goals are going to be so significant.
I congratulate the CDC on their report. I wish to remind my colleagues how valuable this kind of health care reform is. It is not what we yell about here, but it is out there right now saving lives and saving money. We need to encourage it and we need to expand it, and the more the administration can put a hard goal out there for itself, the quicker we will get where we need to be, to the great benefit of ourselves as a country and our individual fellow American citizens.
I yield the floor.
