Three Best Practices for Knee Replacement (Biloine Young @ OTW)
Manage patient expectations.
Multidisciplinary teams for complex patients.
Dedicated nurses in the OR.
When orthopedic surgical teams from five of the elite healthcare systems of the country shared best practices for knee replacement—and then faced pushback on their recommendations—it made medical news.
Or it should have.
Called the High Value Healthcare Collaborative, the group was composed of orthopedic surgical teams from the Cleveland Clinic, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Denver Health, Intermountain Healthcare, and the Mayo Clinic.
Cheryl Clark, senior editor and California correspondent for HealthLeaders Media Online, reported on the three best practices that emerged from a review of 11,000 knee replacements undertaken at the participating institutions. They learned that following the best practices reduced patient’s length of stays, lowered readmission rates and improved outcomes for the hospitals that followed them.
Ivan Tomerk, M.D., an orthopedic surgeon at Dartmouth-Hitchcock who participated in the study, noted that there were significant variations among the five different organizations “even thoug...
