A 59-cent sterilizing sponge and an additional minute to draw each patients blood have helped Memorial Medical Center save at least $2 million in health-care costs over the past two years.

More important, the modification Memorial adopted for testing patients blood for dangerous infections such as sepsis has meant quicker and more appropriate medical responses to those infections. Patients have suffered less as a result, and its likely that some lives have been saved, Memorial officials say.

Its provided physicians with the right information sooner, said David Neff, a Memorial project leader for operations improvement.

The effort to hone in on certain types of blood tests to make them more accurate the first time around is one of dozens of projects the Springfield hospital has undertaken to improve care at a time when the federal government and private insurers are starting to reward hospitals for quality rather than quantity.

Memorial recently learned it performed well in the first year of one of the first large pay-for-performance programs set in motion by the federal Affordable Care Act. The hospital also expects to receive a financial bonus in December through another such incentive in the health-reform law.

Readmissions low

Memorial was one of 17 hospitals in Illinois, out of about 130 ranked, that will receive no financial penalty over the next 12 months based on readmission rates for patients treated for heart attack, congestive heart failure or pneumonia.

Weve been working hard on this, and we track this, and weve done a number of initiatives, so we were certainly gratified to have this result, said Charles Callahan, vice president for quality and operations at Memorials parent organization, Memorial Health System.

Readmissions are one focus of the governments health-care reform efforts because they often result from uncoordinated care, both inside the hospital and after a patient is discharged. Almost one in five Medicare patients return to the hospital within a month, and until now, hospitals have been financially rewarded for that with additional Medicare payments.

Memorial could have faced a penalty of up to 1 percent of its base Medicare rates, or about $1 million annually, based on the percentage of patients readmitted within 30 days of discharge, with adjustments made for patients age, gender and medical history. The not-for-profit institution annually posts about $480 million in patient-service revenues; about $192 million of those revenues come from Medicare.

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Memorial works on efficiency to improve care, avoid health-reform penalties