As Congress was working on healthcare reform proposals, KPMG developed a detailed questionnaire to help providers assess their readiness for substantive change. Based on our own research and meetings with healthcare thought leaders, we expected that, even before the passage of legislation, universal coverage, payment reform, implementation of electronic health records, heightened regulatory enforcement, and comparative effectiveness research would affect most, if not all, phases of a healthcare systems operations and delivery. We designed the questionnaire to assist multi-hospital health systems, academic medical centers, and community hospitals in assessing their preparedness for the impact of reform in the following key areas:
Regulatory enforcement
Clinical automation
Quality
Operations management
System integration
Commitment to care management and disease prevention
Transparency

KPMGs detailed assessment was designed to:
Assess key activities and provide indices of reform readiness in the seven key areas
Provide measures of how well-prepared the organization is for reform (according to its own assessment)
Deliver a dashboard depicting an overall index of readiness, an index for each area, and detail within each index
Be updated as changes in healthcare reform take place

The survey tool was jointly completed by participating health systems and high level KPMG Healthcare Advisory staff in a one-day on-site session with each participant. Results were summarized in the absolute and comparative (peer group and universe).


During this session, we will describe the challenges and barriers we faced in developing our survey in order to be applicable to the future of healthcare as well as related to specific healthcare reform policies that were likely to be legislated and implemented. In order to do this we kept informed as to the various bills that were drafted, and designed the survey so that it could be updated as the legislative landscape changed. In this session, we will present the results of our survey which will represent the readiness of the survey respondents at the time we met with them. We will also engage attendees in discussing their experiences in preparing for healthcare reform, and how they continue to prepare for the changing landscape.

The Senior Vice President of Corporate Operations, Jerry Wollman, of the University of Maryland Medical System, will reflect on how discussions during the survey process and after our report was made available focused internal groups on activities that needed to be addressed, as well as confirmed that they were preparing for change in specific areas. He will discuss expected and unexpected results of the survey, such as how information gleaned from the survey process affected strategic thinking within the organization, and its applicability in educating the Board of Directors.

We will also present lessons learned from our discussions with survey participants relative to preparing for reform specifically, as well as other leading practices that we identified during our encounters with the participants.