Pendulum offers hospital and hospital systems the opportunity to identify and prioritize performance improvement initiatives that can assist in furthering integration efforts, improve revenue cycle planning, improve managed care negotiations and set in motion an opportunity to directly contract with employers looking for top performance specialty services and /or wellness management programs

How is this different from what you are doing now?
Most hospitals are measuring outcomes based on Medicare requirements and methods of payment based on DRG’s. This approach to collecting billing information to measure quality often distorts the ability to measure quality because it separates outpatient and inpatient services into unit cost and volume statistics.

Medicare has already announced they are moving to a “ pay for performance” approach in the market and many managed care companies are following Medicare’s lead just as they did with DRGs, RBRVS and APC’s. The tool that Pendulum offers will be the key to retaining your Medicare franchise as well as be an upper hand with insurance companies who attempt to rate hospitals and medical staffs with sweeping generalizations from data drawn from other geographic locations. This is your local delivery system and as the market becomes more sophisticated, the data available to you as well as the physicians staff, should become more sophisticated as well.

Our approach
Before you dive for the phone to call IT, we want to let you know Pendulum is a service. We have purchased the licenses from several well known vendors to extract data and group information for comparison. We have also obtained licenses and access to several public and private databases that are maintained by our team of analysts, many of whom come from the clinical side of medical management firms as well as experienced executives in building specialty joint ventures and creating direct contracts with employers. This means as we work with you to create the database of your integrated care system information core, we can take EXSISTING billing and planning files from the hospital and physicians, ancillary care providers, and pharmacy services and consolidate them into one very large data base and begin looking for trends.

Five business questions Pendulum Healthcare Development Corporation can assist your management team to address.
Once we start grouping by patient population and by diagnosis attached to episodes, we will have a global series of datasets including financial data that can then be examined to determine your facilities institutes of excellence.

1. These efforts will address the question of integration that will continue to be a question managed care companies and the department of justice will ask. That being - are you an integrated system under federal definition or just part of a cartel asking for increases in prices.
   
   
2. The second business question will be who do we partner with on our medical staff to get the best institute for cardiology, the best orthopedics, the best cancer care center etc.
   
   
3. In addition, as Medicare moves to competitive bidding based upon Prospective inpatient diagnostic cost groups (PIPDCGs) having access to your episodes and cost factors tied to local norms and definitions of quality is extremely valuable to maintain your Medicare franchise.

   In the big picture, loosing Medicare lives in a competitive market because the federal government says you are overpriced and /or offering substandard quality is a bad signal in the market place. It will not only force your hospital to be shunned by private payers like managed care and insurer networks but will certainly send the signal to medical staff to avoid admitting at your institution.

4. The final very real issue for hospitals through the next decade is access to capital. The health capital forum as well as HFMA and other health care associations have told us that quality is a big issue in whether or not a facility keeps or improves its bond rating. This access to capital is vital as technology demands move forward quickly and facilities grow older and are in need of repair or expansion.

   Probably the most vulnerability comes from the need for capital to joint venture with medical staff to form centers of excellence. Without the capital to be the partner, physicians can look elsewhere to for profit corporate partners or to competing facilities that will demand a surge of admissions to cover the partnership cost of investment.
   
   We can work with your IT department to gather the information, and are always happy to discuss HIPAA and other issues, but like so many hospitals, a capital expenditure to form your own department of Performance Improvement just is not in the budget. However, outsourcing the very difficult tasks of the grouping of data and analysis for the projects described above is a necessary part of doing business.

5. A number of hospitals have told us that as an independent source of quality measurement and utilization experience medical staff has been more forthcoming with their cooperation because they believe in the evidenced base approach from an individual source, especially when Pendulum can offer its medical leadership team as a resource to your current medical director to help brave necessary changes to accomplish the delivery system transformation our clients desire.

Our Experience
Pendulum Health represents a team of management executives, clinical specialists, database analysts, biostatistic resources and support staff. All of these individuals have 20 plus years of experience in a variety of settings and are senior leaders in their respective specialties. These specialties include operations, credentialing and benchmarking, actuarial science, and employer and physician networking.

Our Credentials.