By embedding the patient’s voice and perspective across the continuum of quality improvement, the Oregon Health Care Quality Corporation, the AF4Q initiative leader in Oregon, is transforming the future of ambulatory care. Quality Corp’s Patients and Families as Leaders initiative is changing the health care landscape in Oregon, one relationship at a time. “A successful patient advisory program prepares an organization to understand the importance of consumer engagement,” said Mary Minniti, project director for the Oregon Health Care Quality Corporation’s...
Finding information about the quality of the health care offered in your community is hard. Aligning Forces for Quality communities are blazing new trails, making this information more readily available and easier to understand in publicly available reports. These reports help physicians and hospitals identify areas for improvement, guide consumers’ decisions in choosing high-quality providers, and offer employers and insurers objective information on the quality of care being delivered. Three AF4Q communities—Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Minnesota—worked with ...
October’s issue of Consumer Reports included a special insert of Consumer Reports Health which featured the great measurement and reporting work at MN Community Measurement (MNCM). Covering 552 Minnesota physician group practices, the project studied patient results in cardiovascular disease and diabetes, two of the deadliest chronic diseases.
Physician groups were scored on the percentage of patients who achieve all of the targets for the best management of each condition. For cardiovascular disease, that required appropriate blood pressure , level of...
Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States and the leading cause of cancer deaths among nonsmokers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But in Minnesota, MN Community Measurement has found that only 64 percent of people are getting appropriate colorectal cancer screenings.
To help health care providers talk with patients about the benefits and risks of all their colorectal cancer screening options, the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement (ICSI) developed an innovative pilot project. It set out to train...
Half of the 135,000 residents in Humboldt County, CA, live outside its small towns. Like many rural areas, Humboldt has significant health challenges, including limited access to certain types of care, hundreds of miles separating some residents from their doctors, and higher rates of those with chronic health conditions or no health insurance.
Fortunately, Humboldt County also is home to one of the most promising health care initiatives helping people with chronic conditions manage their own care more effectively.
To improve overall health and reduce costs in an overextended...
The Greater Detroit Area Health council (GDAHC), which leads the AF4Q initiative in Detroit, wanted to make it more convenient for people in southeast Michigan with diabetes to learn how to manage their care better. Inspired by an earlier effort funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to identify interventions with the most impact, in 2008 GDAHC started developing a pilot program to provide diabetes self-management education (DSME) sessions to local employees where they work.
Continuing its focus on consumer engagement, the Puget Sound Health Alliance (PSHA), through its Your Voice Matters initiative, has invited e-Patient Dave (Dave deBronkart) to put a face and story to its patient empowerment mission. E-Patient Dave is a cancer survivor whose catchphrase, “patient is not a third-person word,” embodies the Your Voice Matters initiative.
Your Voice Matters is PSHA’s groundbreaking effort to understand how patients experience their primary health care providers and give them tools to take ownership of their health. Its newest...
Successful multi-stakeholder alliances take many shapes and sizes. In AF4Q, these groups include those who receive care, provide care, and pay for care. The Healthy Memphis Common Table (HMCT)—the Aligning Forces for Quality grantee in Memphis, TN—expanded its alliance to include grocery stores as community partners. At first, this may not seem germane to health care quality and equity—a focal point of HMCT’s work—but closer inspection reveals its potential impact on food deserts is extreme.
Food deserts, or areas in otherwise developed nations...
The Oregon Health Care Quality Corporation (Quality Corp) had already worked with the Oregon Health Authority, Oregon Health Leadership Council, and the Center for Evidence-Based Policy at Oregon Health and Science University to develop an Oregon-specific, evidence-based guideline to help practitioners evaluate and manage low back pain. But this Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q) Alliance realized that consumers also needed some tools to help them understand low back pain and reset their expectations about safe and effective care.
Read the rest of this AF4Q...
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...