Massachusetts Health Quality Partners (MHQP) and Consumers Reports collaborated to provide Massachusetts consumers with reliable and useful information about primary care physicians. Together, MHQP and Consumer Reports released patient experience ratings of nearly 500 primary care physician practices in Massachusetts, including 329 adult practices and 158 pediatric practices. The report promotes patient engagement, encouraging consumers and creating opportunities for them to become more involved in their health care. Patients can use the MHQP findings, now featured in the special report...
The Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q) Puget Sound Health Alliance knew that increasing generic prescribing could translate into significant savings without compromising quality.
Armed with this knowledge, the Alliance used a multi-stakeholder process to create a report on variations in generic drug prescribing among and within medical groups in the four classes of drugs measured in the 2011 Community Checkup.
Read the rest of this AF4Q Bright Spot...
The Maine Health Management Coalition (MHMC), a partner in AF4Q Maine, wanted to encourage its members to seek care from the high quality, cost-effective providers MHMC identified. But MHMC encountered three problems:
- getting people to use the publicly reported quality information,
- helping labor and management to see eye-to-eye on changing benefits to get care at a better...
The Wisconsin Sentinel covers the challenges and complexity groups in the state such as the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality, the state’s AF4Q Alliance, face to gather health care quality information using Medicare claims data.
Read the article.
Aligning Forces for Quality – South Central PA (AF4Q – South Central PA) launched its new website (www.Aligning4HealthPA.org) in an effort to provide more resources (videos, tip sheets, events, etc.) and easy-to-understand information that leads patients to become more engaged in their care, and receive the right care at the right time. AF4Q – South Central PA is one of 16 communities across the nation that’s focused on helping patients understand what high quality care is, and how to...
Stillwater Medical Group, one of nine medical groups participating in the Minnesota AF4Q Alliance, has made an early commitment to publicly reporting patient experiences in relation to quality of care. The facility adopted the CG-CAHPS tool in order to identity areas of improvement in patient experience and to monitor results. Marked improvements were made in terms of patients’ rating of their own doctors, from 79% to 84% in just one year (Q4 2009 – Q4 2010), proving that by standard measuring – quality can improve. Stillwater's achievements are one of the three...
The Greater Boston AF4Q Alliance released its seventh annual clinical quality data report, Quality Insights: Primary Care in Massachusetts. The report was covered by the Boston Business Journal, USA Today's Massachusetts page,...
In Minnesota, the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement (ICSI) has worked on managing depression for more than a decade. Its groundbreaking DIAMOND (Depression Improvement Across Minnesota, Offering a New Direction) initiative has measured depression care since 2007. Recently the National Quality Forum endorsed four mental health measures used in DIAMOND that focus on depression care and patient satisfaction during an inpatient psychiatric hospital stay. The endorsed measures provide important outcomes data. DIAMOND is the first depression treatment program in the nation...
In August, 2011, the Puget Sound Health Alliance, one of 16 communities in the Aligning Forces for Quality project, released its annual Community Checkup report, “the result of a collaborative effort to improve the quality and affordability of health care in [their] region.” The report, which has enlarged in scope and scale since its first iteration, now contains results for more than 80 medical groups and more than 300 clinics in the community. The report issues scores on four areas including:
- ...