Consumer Engagement
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...
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The strengths and benefits of Our Pathways to Health, an innovative program of the Community Health Alliance of Humboldt County, were touted recently in the EurekaTimes-Standard. The 15-hour, six-week workshop has more than 500 graduates since the first class was held in Humboldt County in 2008. This program for consumer engagement work at the Humboldt AF4Q Alliance has shown marked results in the community. Our Pathways to Health participants demonstrate sizable improvements in...
"For people with the most common type of low back pain, imaging tests don’t give doctors much information that’s useful for diagnosis or treatment and a non-prescription pain reliever is the best choice if medication is needed. Despite that, 2010 data shows at least 26 percent of Oregonians who received care for a new episode of simple low back pain received an imaging test and approximately 15 percent filled prescriptions for narcotic pain relievers within 90 days.
A new campaign launched as part of the Oregon Health Care Quality Corporation’s Partner for...
Impact
95% rated their ability to self-manage as “good” or “excellent.”
Through Our Pathways to Health in AF4Q’s Humboldt County Alliance, a cadre of trained volunteers, all of whom have or care for someone with a chronic disease, such as diabetes, convened in a six-week curriculum, providing education and peer support to help patients manage their conditions and maintain active and fulfilling lives. They have surpassed 500 graduates.
Results are of participants in a post-graduation survey.
The vision of Aligning Forces for Quality is to raise the quality of health care by engaging all key stakeholders—the people who provide care, pay for care, and get care. Health care consumers—those who get care—are an important part of this equation for a number of reasons. Consumers have an interest in finding and accessing high-quality, high-value health care for their families; they can make choices about health care that promote quality improvement; and, particularly for patients with chronic disease or their caregivers, they can participate actively in their care to improve their health. Consumer involvement is a valuable and powerful force at many points along the continuum of health care quality and system redesign. Aligning Forces for Quality serves as a unique experiment in engaging consumers at key points along this continuum – including public reporting of health care quality, chronic disease self management, and clinical quality improvement. Engaging and sustaining consumer involvement is not easy, but Aligning Forces communities are learning best practices and the far-reaching benefits of employing them.
Consumer involvement in coalition leadership facilitates efforts to develop reader-friendly public reports. This is often an iterative process. The Puget Sound Health Alliance released its first public Community Checkup report in 2008. Although this effort laid the foundation for a practice of transparency, the online report was a dense PDF document, highly technical and difficult to navigate. When local employers wanted to mobilize their employees to identify and access high-quality care using the Community Checkup, coalition partners sought to update the report into a more accessible format. They converted the PDF to a navigable Web-based format and included symbols and plain language to help users interpret the data. The coalition continues to modify data display based upon feedback from expert consultants, consumer focus groups and one-on-one usability testing.