New Harvard Study Could Change Orthopedics Forever (Orthopedics This Week)
In what is likely the one of the first-ever attempt to map a cycle of care using an advanced economic model, researchers from Harvard have joined together with business gurus at the same institution. Jon J.P. Warner, M.D. is chief of the Shoulder Service at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-director of the Boston Shoulder Institute Fellowship worked in collaboration with Laurence D. Higgins, M.D. chief of the Sports Medicine and Shoulder Service at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. A former president of the American Shoulder and Elbow Society (ASES), Dr. Warner told OTW, “Dr. Higgins and I have worked with Robert Kaplan and his colleagues at the Harvard Business School, and have just completed a study where we looked at the actual cost of an episode of care for rotator cuff surgery. By mapping the entire cycle of care and carefully analyzing each step, we were able to reduce the price of the entire one year episode of care by 15%.
“The tool we used—Time-Driven Activity Based Costing (TDABC)—allowed us to map the cycle of care. This accounting methodology analyzes use of resources including individual car...
