Measurement & Reporting
 
Navigating the health care system can be a challenge for anyone. It’s hard to find a compatible primary care provider. Hospitals are intimidating. Being sick is overwhelming. Cincinnati Aligning Forces for Quality (Cincinnati AF4Q), led by the Health Collaborative, is taking action and empowering consumers to be informed advocates of their health care.
 
To educate patients, help them find a doctor, and help them take the next steps in accessing high- quality care, the Health Collaborative launched a website,...

When Aligning Forces for Quality grantee Better Health Greater Cleveland began publicly releasing information on the quality of local health care five years ago, leaders wanted to avoid the competition that derailed a similar effort decades ago. This time around, participating medical groups put a premium on cooperating to improve care for diabetes, high blood pressure and heart failure patients. Today, Cleveland hospitals and medical practices document quality gaps and gains together, and share and celebrate successful interventions.

Journalist Bruce Japsen examines how Better...

When Cincinnati health leaders planned their community’s Aligning Forces for Quality work, they discovered that people with diabetes weren’t always aware of the recommended care they should be receiving—or whether their doctors provided it.  The Health Collaborative of Greater Cincinnati therefore developed an approach to educate patients and measure the care delivered by local providers to better tackle the disease.

Respected journalist Geri Aston explores how Cincinnati’s physicians, insurers and Fortune 500 companies are working together to...

AF4Q Alliances, are leading multiple initiatives to improve the quality of care while lowering costs in their communities. As part of this effort, some Alliances have launched programs to educate consumers about unnecessary variations in the cost and quality of care. The American Institutes for...

Type II diabetes has become a national public health threat. As a chronic disease, diabetes is one of the leading causes of death and disability. In the United States, approximately 25.8 million people (8.3 percent of the population) meet the criteria for a diagnosis of diabetes, and 79 million people have pre-diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance. According to the National Institutes of Health, diabetes is associated with long-term complications that affect almost every part of the body. The disease often leads to blindness, heart and blood vessel disease, stroke, kidney failure,...

When MN Community Measurement, leader of AF4Q in Minnesota, first started publicly reporting data, the belief was that patients would use the data to make choices about what doctor to see. This, in turn, would drive improvement. What has been surprising, according to Jim Chase, president of MN Community Measurement, is the amount of attention providers have given the public reports and the comparisons they make to their peers’ performance. “We’ve been using it in a variety of ways: to improve our services, to improve our clinical workflows, to implement tools so we could...

Cincinnati Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q), led by the Health Collaborative, is putting data to work to improve diabetes care among its patients. Starting in 2009, the Health Collaborative brought a group of physicians together to discuss what public reporting measures would be considered valuable to improving patient care. With the prevalence of diabetes in the Cincinnati area higher than the national average, the group chose to focus on those outcomes first. Physicians were provided with a “daily dashboard” of data. Dr. Michael Trombley, family physician at Mercy Health,...

Quality Field Notes features key lessons learned by regional alliances of clinicians, patients, and payers in Aligning Forces for Quality communities as they work to transform local health care and provide models for national reform. The second topic in this series focuses on using performance measurement data to improve quality. Growing evidence suggests that physicians who publicly report their performance on quality of care...
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation challenged video game developers to leverage data from Aligning Forces for Quality, the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps program, and other databases to create games that engage patients and health providers in generating new quality data.
 
Winners were announced at Health 2.0's fall conference.
 
  • First Place: Edward Kim and James Park, wHealth
  • Second Place: Swatee Surve, Litesprite
  • Third...

When knee pain finally drove Albert Brooks II to see a doctor, he soon discovered that his bum knee was the least of his health problems. His blood pressure was so high that doctors wouldn’t let him leave the office until they were able to get it down—and Brooks soon learned he had diabetes and high cholesterol, too.

We are identifying specific approaches that are effective in different populations.

High blood pressure usually has no symptoms and can affect the brain, heart, and kidneys, increasing the risk of stroke and...