Cardiac Centre of Excellence, Netherlands

Integrated Health Solutions^SM assessed the hospital's potential, identified barriers, and improved patient recruitment.

The Challenge

This hospital is considered a centre of excellence in Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) therapy in the Netherlands. Given its status, there was high interest from both physicians and administrators to ensure that all patients in need of TAVR within its service area had access to the therapy. Because the number of annual procedures had stagnated to 40–50 annually, the hospital team was eager to understand whether the need for treatment had tapered because all patients eligible for TAVR had received the therapy, or if there were barriers affecting the proper identification and channelling of patients to the hospital. In addition, the hospital wanted to perform a benchmarking exercise to gauge how its treatment rates for TAVR faired with those of other top heart centres in the country.

The Solution

In 2013, the hospital partnered with Integrated Health Solutions^SM to quantify the potential unmet patient need and assess the key barriers within their service area.

We engaged the hospital team, clinicians, administrative and financial staff using Medtronic’s ‘Patient Access Solutions’ methodology, a statistically-validated framework designed to analyse the market and surrounding competition to boost patient access. Our current database includes more than 430 assessments over 10 years.

We guided the team through our thorough four-step approach:

Step 1 – Quantify Patient Treatment Need
Step 2 – Identify the Barriers to Patient Access
Step 3 – Prioritise the Barriers
Step 4 – Formulate Strategies

The Impact

The TAVR annual implant rate more than doubled within one year. The number of patients getting access to TAVR treatment at the hospital increased from 43 to 108 (58% compound annual growth rate).

This was achieved in two steps: Create capacity at the hospital to accommodate more patients, and establish a regular process for better care coordination with referrers to identify appropriate patients and channel them to the hospital

The value of our involvement was realised from enabling the hospital to objectively estimate the patient treatment untapped potential, understand the key barriers and, most importantly, align the organisation on the most efficient initiatives to accelerate recruitment.

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