Consumer Engagement
HMCT launched a new smartphone app that connects users to quality information about health care provided in the Greater Memphis region. The app, based on information from HMCT’s public reporting website www.healthcarequalitymatters.org, puts information about diabetes, pediatric care, and women’s health into patient’s pockets! “Patients need to be both educated and engaged with their health care” said Reneé S. Frazier, CEO of the Health Memphis Common Table...
A growing number of quality improvement projects are enabling patients, families, and advocates to advise and affect decision-making within their local health care systems. A new report from Aligning Forces for Quality shares the experiences of five communities that are engaging consumers to improve ambulatory care. A recent Lessons Learned piece describes efforts made in the Humboldt County, Oregon, Minnesota, Maine, and South Central Pennsylvania alliances to incorporate consumer engagement into ambulatory quality improvement efforts. While each approach is different, each communities...
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...
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.