The Covid crisis has been and will be a huge and unavoidable distraction for LTC facilities, as the focus has shifted onto maintaining staff levels and supplies of PPE’s, so that patient care can continue. Maintaining uncompromised levels of patient care and outcomes is a challenge under these circumstances, and underlines the need to use trustworthy, value-based, clinically proven products.
Demanding proof of clinical evidence for medical device efficacy is trending and gathering momentum among clinicians, senior management and purchasers, and is having a knock-on effect in all healthcare market segments.
For many years, choosing the lowest possible cost product had always been accepted as best operational practice, but it has been proven to often be at odds with supporting the best standard of care, and is now deemed to be flawed and old-fashioned thinking.
The pendulum is now swinging toward value-based purchasing with clinically evidenced products that help to support higher standards of outcomes-based care, and reduce the use of adjunctive therapies and devices that erode your bottom line.
Show me the evidence
For example, if preventing patient falls from the bed, and pressure injury formation are important to a facility, (both from a safety and fiscal perspective) then they will want assurance that the products they are choosing to purchase really do prevent wounds and falls. But how can they be sure?
Savvy Managers are demanding real, bona-fide clinical evidence from multi-patient clinical outcome studies, performed with real-life patients, and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, not just internal manufacturer produced white papers and corporate marketing pieces with company produced lab test results or patient anecdotes.
Nobody would prescribe their patients a wound or drug therapy that wasn’t clinically proven first, so why would anybody risk their patients skin integrity and fall-safety to non-proven low-cost products … it just doesn’t make sense.
Low cost products may not have any testing performed to validate clinical efficacy, and internal lab testing and marketing white papers may be biased, and may not provide an accurate account of a products clinical benefits.
It’s all about “value-based” products and creating a new standard of care..
So what is “value-based” product purchasing, and why is it important? In a nutshell, it is blending fiscal responsibility with patient advocacy. Value-based purchasing is not just looking for the lowest product cost, but is about product performance criteria in terms of patient satisfaction, better outcomes and preventing complications that result in further expenditure. All products are not created equal, so gathering as much bona-fide independent performance data as possible will help you to make smart product choices.
For support surfaces and seating, that means making sure that the product you are procuring has been clinically tested, and is proven to improve safety concerns regarding fall reduction and prevention, that it prevents pressure injuries and that it improves comfort and can support the healing of existing wounds. Ask for the true clinical evidence that validates the product.
Ignoring these criteria and basing your procurement on lowest possible cost alone is false economy…because it may end up costing your facility more money in the future in terms of transportable falls and adjunctive wound healing therapies, and possible fines. It may also affect the quality rating and marketability of your organization as a whole.
For this reason, Clinicians need to be actively involved in making sound product decisions that will benefit their patients, and their business as a whole, based on gathering as much clinical evidence as possible, as proof and assurance that your chosen product will perform appropriately and economically.
This is the crux of the movement toward value-based product purchasing, using evidence-based products for outcomes-based care.
