When Canada's premiers pledged six years ago to shorten the queues for cataract surgery and hip replacements, one of the answers put forward was private health care. Many of the promises have been delivered, through a combination of public and private actors that found new ways to improve services and lower costs within the publicly funded system.
A key inspiration came from an unexpected place: the shop floor. Health-care practitioners are borrowing techniques from manufacturers by streamlining operations and spinning off bits of their businesses as separate, specialized units. Clinics dedicated to one medical procedure are slowly but steadily emerging in Canada with a “focused factory” approach that produces better care for less money.
One payoff has yet to come, though. Motivated by an injection of competition, doctors have found ways to perform certain surgeries far more quickly and cheaply than before. But provincial health bureaucracies have been slow to make similar adjustments to the fees they pay for those procedures.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Jane Swarney is relaxing in the recovery room at the Kensington Eye Institute, feeling relieved that the operation to remove a cataract from her right eye went so smoothly.
The retired nurse has worked in hospitals in Toronto, New York and Honolulu. She says her experience at Kensington was “first class,” from the staff who patiently told her what to expect to the wood-panelled reception area that looks like a hotel lobby and her comfortable reclining chair that folds back to become an operating room table.
“It was just a non event,” she says. “I would gladly come and have this done all over again.”
Ms. Swarney was one of 27 patients that Wednesday, a slow day for one of the country's busiest cataract clinics. It has single-handedly made a huge dent in the waiting list for cataract surgery in the Toronto area, where the wait is now 127 days for the surgery, down 60 per cent from 2005.
Kensington is a leader in adapting manufacturing practices to medical care. From its unassuming perch on the sixth floor of a medical building in downtown Toronto's eclectic Kensington Market neighbourhood, the private, not-for-profit clinic is quietly bucking the trend of health-care costs that seem to go nowhere but up.
When Kensington opened its doors in January, 2006, it received $5-million in funding to perform 6,700 cataract surgeries a year. Two years later, the clinic had increased its caseload to 7,200 patients a year with the same budget.
“We did that through operating efficiencies,” says Brian McFarlane, chief executive officer of the clinic.
Kensington also owes some of its success to the vision of Alan Hudson. In 2004, the same year the federal government reached an historic deal with the provinces to inject an additional $18-billion into the medicare system to cut waiting times, Premier Dalton McGuinty appointed Dr. Hudson to lead the push in Ontario. The former neurosurgeon and hospital president led the drive to reduce the number of patients stranded on waiting lists for joint replacements, cardiac care, cancer treatment and sight restoration.
Dr. Hudson came up with a novel approach to deal with patients who were waiting a year or more for treatment. He created internal competition within the system by asking hospitals and clinics to submit bids.
“This worked like a charm,” says Dr. Hudson, giving his first interview since resigning last year as chairman of embattled eHealth Ontario, an effort to accelerate the switch to electronic records that ran into a storm over fees paid to outside consultants. “It's been a test case, a terrific success. It's hard to find people who aren't happy.”
Hospitals already allocated a portion of their global budgets for the surgeries on Dr. Hudson's list. But now they could receive additional money under the wait-time program, if only they could promise to deliver a given number of procedures.
That financial incentive within the public system, says Dr. Hudson, was enough to encourage many public hospitals to find ways to cut the cost of cataract surgeries, through a combination of technology and reorganizing resources.
