Tenet Healthcare Corporation (THC)

December 10, 2012 3:30 pm ET

Executives

Thomas R. Rice - Senior Vice President of Investor Relations

Kelvin A. Baggett - Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President

Analysts

Joshua R. Raskin - Barclays Capital, Research Division

Presentation

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Tenet Investor Webinar Clinical Operations Conference Call. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host for today, Mr. Thomas Rice, Senior VP, Investor Relations. Please proceed.

Thomas R. Rice

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the seventh in Tenet's 2012 webinar series. As the operator mentioned, today's webinar will focus on clinical operations. Our speaker is Dr. Kelvin Baggett, Senior Vice President, Clinical Operation and Tenet's Chief Medical Officer. Dr. Baggett is responsible for the efforts to improve clinical outcomes and the efficiency associated with achieving those outcomes in all Tenet inpatient and outpatient settings. Dr. Baggett reports directly to Trevor Fetter, Tenet's President and CEO.

Dr. Baggett completed his training in internal medicine at Yale Medical School and completed dual scholarships as a general internal medical fellow at Duke Medical school and as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His fellowship work focused on improving the quality, safety and efficiency of medical care.

To the extent that there are forward-looking statements made on this call, those statements are subject to the cautionary statements included in our SEC filings. Dr. Baggett, the floor is yours.

Kelvin A. Baggett

Thank you, Tom, and good afternoon. The presentation should be seen in a PDF format. So what I will do is make reference to the slide number occasionally, just to keep it on track. But of course, that means I will not be advancing any slides.

Just to give an overview, today, we'll talk about some of the things that are going on in the macro environment of health care and how it's impacting and influencing some of the things that we're focused on here from a clinical operational perspective. We'll talk about our internal focus and part of that is our strategy, which you've heard in many other calls similar to this. And we'll go back and revisit Tenet's position on clinical quality and the way that really formalize that and we worked to formalize that in 2003 with our Commitment to Quality and talk about how we've continued to advance that commitment and the associated results.

Next, we'll move to our clinical quality agenda 2.0 and compare and contrast a little bit the difference between the way that we worked and viewed it in 2003 as compared to the way that we're working on and doing it today. Well, of course, in each of those highlight the results that we've been able to achieve, and then talk a little bit about what's on the horizon and how we're continuing to demonstrate leadership in those areas as well.

So as we all know, the environment of health care is changing, and what we're hearing a lot about and what we're talking a lot about here at Tenet is value. And as we progress through this, I'll get to a slide that specifically defines value for us and how we think about it, how we create strategies around it and how we work to improve it. But what we do know is that both from a commercial payer perspective with value-based insurance design, federal payers such as Medicare and their value-based purchasing initiative that this is continuing to be at the forefront of the changing reimbursement model and also incorporate some of that increased risk sharing that also has been introduced into the marketplace.

The second trend that we continue to see more of and hear more about is safety and the actions that can be reasonably taken to present potential harm to patients while they are under a hospital care or under care in any other clinical environment. And there are a lot of emerging external reporting event be it at the state level or be it with other organizations, public and private, to create increased transparency, awareness and action around that. And we're doing a lot of work in that area, and we're achieving a lot of results. Obviously, like every other institution, our goal on each day is to continue to improve, and safety is one of those areas where we continue to focus and strive for greater improvement as well.

The third piece is around the alignment of providers of care and the clinical settings in which that care is being provided. And so we're seeing this, if you look at some of the bundling things that are taking place, those initiatives from Medicare and others, if you'll look at accountable care organizations both in the federal payer domain as well as in the public payer domain, there is that shared risk in the management of populations as well.

On Slide #6, we've highlighted 6 key elements of the Tenet strategy. And I've checked 3, and those 3 are most closely related to the work that we do day in and day out in clinical operations. We are committed to helping to differentiate our hospitals and other clinical care environments based on superior quality and service, and we're also committed to driving and providing greater value to our customers. Secondly, we are seeking to align with our physicians across our facilities to improve quality and efficiency, which gets to increasing that value proposition as well.

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