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...
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,...
- 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...