By Tim Bonfield
The Cincinnati Enquirer

As health care costs soar, James Anderson says hospitals need to do a better job of making the business case for quality care.

Anderson is chief executive of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. In recent weeks, he has been making speeches to employees and other groups about how providing better quality service also can save money.

The nationally prestigious pediatric center has made several cost-saving changes in recent years as part of a hospital-wide "Pursuing Perfection" project. Among them:

• A 70 percent reduction in respiratory costs for patients hospitalized with bronchiolitis, an inflammation of the air tubes leading to the lungs.

• A 37 percent reduction in hospital admissions for asthma.

These kinds of changes help make health care more affordable for everyone, he says.

"Sometimes people ask me, 'Do we really want to do something that will reduce revenue?'" Anderson says. "My answer is, 'It's OK.' The first priority is to deliver the best care possible."

It also helps that other quality improvements can increase hospital revenue. Recent reforms in surgery and anesthesia services have increased productivity more than 15 percent.

The reduced stays for asthma and bronchiolitis means the hospital misses out on about $2 million a year in potential billings. But Anderson notes that the hospital gained $47 million by being more efficient in the operating rooms.

RITALIN STUDY: Some research studies are hinting that children who take Ritalin might suffer some amount of stunted growth. A local medical service is part of a study that seeks to find out for sure.

The Tri-State Sleep Disorders Center in Springdale is seeking children, ages 7 to 12, who are taking Ritalin three times a day for attention-deficit problems. The goal is to assess whether Ritalin and other compounds affect the levels of a child's growth hormone levels.

Children and parents will be compensated. For more information contact the center at 671-3101.

LESS-INVASIVE SURGERY: In another potential cost-saving trend, patients in Greater Cincinnati are recovering faster from more kinds of operations as surgeons continue expanding ways to perform minimally invasive surgery.

Rather than making incisions large enough to insert a surgeon's hands, minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery is done through small holes in the body while the surgeon uses special tools and watches his movements with a video monitor.

At University and Christ hospitals, Dr. Joseph Buell has begun applying these techniques to increasingly complex liver and pancreas surgeries. In December, Buell became one of the few surgeons nationwide to perform a "laparoscopic trisegment" procedure that removed three-fourths of a patient's diseased liver without a large incision.

E-mail tbonfield@enquirer.com