The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s 16 Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q) communities are showing that bringing together the people who give care, get care and pay for care improves quality.
After six years, AF4Q communities have built transformative partnerships, often where none existed before:
- Data on quality, cost and patient experience measures are being collected and publicly reported.
- Practice coaches are deployed in hundreds of primary care practices.
- Hospitals are improving care from the emergency department (ED)...
AF4Q communities are at the forefront; re-thinking the way in which health care is organized, delivered, and paid for. For example, one prominent model for re-thinking the delivery of primary care is patient-centered medical homes, and several Aligning Forces communities are on the frontlines.
In the Maine AF4Q Alliance, 22 adult and four pediatric practices covering 130,000 patients and 15 percent of the state's physicians are part of a PCMH pilot. Maine's Medicaid program an most major insurers have aligned forces to pay pilot practices differently and use patient...
Independent Practice Association (IPA), a major partner in the Humboldt County AF4Q alliance, has long acknowledged the essential role of patient engagement in developing and redesigning systems of care. Yet, putting this value into action has been an incremental process.
As the organizational body that represents 98 percent of all medical providers in the county, the IPA has a history of supporting its members in quality improvement initiatives. In 2009, the IPA adopted an ambulatory quality improvement collaborative model pioneered at Care Oregon, called Primary Care Renewal (PCR...
Better Health Greater Cleveland (Better Health) began offering primary care practices free on-site technical assistance to improve the quality of care and care delivery in 2009.
The coaches are focusing their efforts on improving clinical outcomes, care coordination, patient experience, and optimizing electronic health record (EHR) use. In addition, the coaches work with the practices to achieve certification and National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) patient-centered medical home status.
Read the rest of this AF4Q Bright Spot...
Watch this video to learn more about the South Central Pennsylvania alliance Planned Care Collaborative and Patient Partner programs!
A growing number of quality improvement projects are enabling patients, families, and advocates to advise and affect decision-making within their local health care systems. A report from Aligning Forces for Quality shares the experiences of five communities that are engaging consumers to improve ambulatory care. A recent Lessons Learned piece describes efforts made in the Humboldt County, Oregon, Minnesota, Maine, and South Central Pennsylvania alliances to incorporate consumer engagement into ambulatory quality improvement efforts. While each approach is different, each communities...
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Better Health Greater Cleveland’s efforts to spread the adoption of the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) model of care and electronic health records was the subject of a Plain Dealer editorial. The editorial board opined that cost-saving efforts such as medical homes could not only strongly position Cleveland for federal grants such as the Comprehensive Primary Care Initiative but also lure more businesses into the area.
Read the...
The Puget Sound Health Alliance is working with the University of Washington to improve quality in spirometry testing. Spirometry, a common way to measure functioning of the lungs, is used to diagnose conditions ranging from asthma to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. The test is administered during a clinical visit and then interpreted by the physician. If health care team members haven’t been properly trained in the use of equipment, it can possibly lead to improperly administered or interpreted results. To address this, “…a team at the University of...
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The innovative DIAMOND Program in Minnesota has shown success in caring for patients with depression. Jim Chase, president of MN Community Measurement said, "We knew improving depression care was a very difficult task. We're now starting to see that clinics that implement changes ... have better outcomes." The Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement (ICSI) found that patients enrolled in the DIAMOND were much more likely to report that they were no...
Public reports are an integral part of the AF4Q initiative in West Michigan. Every physician organization participating in the Alliance for Health public report has scored above the national average on diabetes outcome measures for insured patients. The Alliance for Health has produced two reports on diabetes. The first report, using Medicare claims data as the source, contains information of diabetes care processes (e.g., HbA1c testing rates). The second report was based upon clinical data reported from Advantage Health, Lakeshore Health Network, Metro Health, MMPC and Spectrum Health....