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Using Neonatal Intensive Care Units More Wisely for At-Risk Newborns and Their Families.

Escalating US health care expenditures, including estimates that 20% to almost 50% of these costs involve processes, products, and services that do not improve outcomes, have brought renewed attention to the need to improve value in health care.1 Among the 6 waste categories outlined by Berwick and Hackbarth,1 there has been considerable focus on opportunities to reduce overtreatment, “the waste that comes from subjecting patients to care that... cannot possibly help them... rooted in outmoded habits, supply-driven behaviors, and ignoring science.” Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) services are at particularly high risk of overuse. Hospital and professional services reimbursements, reflecting the acute and highly technical nature of intensive care, are favorable and remain closely linked to admission volume and patient days in most regions. Both a legacy of intervention and a fear of litigation in caring for an at-risk population can also contribute to ineffective testing and treatments. The neonatology community is, however, starting to recognize the potential for improving care and controlling resource utilization. A 2015 study describing a systematic process to identify ineffective or harmful neonatal tests and treatments yielded a “Choosing Wisely Top Five” list in part to guide these efforts.2 In recent years, the neonatal care value literature has evolved to also focus more broadly on trends relating to NICU utilization— specifically, increasing admission rates and longer lengths of stay. In the study by Braun et al,3 investigators from Kaiser Permanente share a population-based study describing a decline in NICU utilization—both admission rates and patient days—during a 9-year period. This is an important study, as it describes a trend that is counter to several recent reports of unexplained increasing NICU utilization, particularly for more mature and higher birth-weight infants, using a clinical rather than administrative data set. It is also important because the results may have been associated with several intercurrent performance improvement initiatives. Kaiser Permanente is a large, integrated health care system with a diverse population and a population-based financial payment structure and is in many ways uniquely suited (and motivated) to undertake a project to identify and characterize potential approaches to safely reduce neonatal care that is costly, may be ineffective, separates families, and is potentially harmful. The authors used a risk-adjustment model to ensure that the improvements were associated with postnatal care practices and not with changes in case mix reflecting patients less in need of acute neonatal care. They were also careful to include balancing measures, such as readmission and mortality, among the outcomes. Also important is the residual practice variation, which may hint at future opportunities for reduction in NICU utilization. In the study by Braun et al,3 12% of more than 300 000 liveborn infants were admitted to the NICU. Contrary to public perceptions of NICUs as prematurity colonies, more than two-thirds of these admissions were infants born after 34 weeks gestational age with birth weights more than 2000 g. The risk-adjusted NICU admission rate, accounting for socioeconomic, prenatal, and delivery room variables to control for independent factors that might affect admission or length of stay, decreased 25% over the study period to 10.9% of births, with 92% of the decline represented by infants with greater gestational age and higher birth weights. Importantly, these changes occurred without evidence of higher 30-day readmission or mortality rates. There are compelling reasons that these results might not have been a random occurrence, as the health care system’s clinical leadership had implemented several concurrent performance improvement initiatives associated with decreased NICU admissions. A revised policy raised the + Related article