Consumer Engagement
John Gallagher of the Washington Alliance owns a bed and breakfast, and, according to him, “it’s all about the breakfast.” Three things go into both a great breakfast, and, surprisingly, a consumer engagement campaign: 1) testing everything first; 2) serving it in courses; and 3) making it really enjoyable. First, make sure you’ve tested everything, from recipes to messaging, before putting them out there. Secondly, at the B&B, John serves dishes in courses so they’re memorable; the same can be said for consumer messaging campaigns. Gallagher recommends...
As she sat in the car with her teenage son while he was first learning to drive, Jessica Osborne-Stafsnes felt a familiar mix of excitement and trepidation, much like when Humboldt first embarked upon patient engagement activities. Humboldt tried to go from “zero to sixty” with its patient engagement. “Enthusiasm does not equate to readiness. We tried to scale up our patient engagement activities in an unsustainable way,” she said. Fortunately, Humboldt learned from its mistakes. The Humboldt Alliance took those lessons and created a roadmap to support patient...
More than 7 million children live with asthma in the United States. As a school nurse, Lizzie Cockrell has seen children struggle to control their asthma symptoms. One of her students, Judy, darkened the doorstep of the health room often. “Recess, PE, health—she was spending those times with me in the health room,” said Cockrell. Looking for answers and help, Cockrell remembered the Asthma Ready Program and used its tools and guidelines to coordinate among Judy’s family and her doctor to assess control of her asthma. Judy’s story is one that “...
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.