Collaborative will seek to spark best practices
Collaborative will seek to spark best practices
Targets purchasers, consumers, providers
A new national collaborative seeks to spark grass-roots support for quality improvement by promoting best practices even beyond the health care community to purchasers and consumers.
The National Coalition on Health Care in Washington, DC, has teamed up with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston to launch Accelerating Change Today — For America’s Health. The initiative will produce best practices reports and will use various methods, including the Internet, to spread the word.
How to spread the word?
"To a large degree, we felt that information wasn’t getting out there to providers, purchasers, and consumers," says Joel Miller, MSEd, director of policy for the coalition. "What was needed was an extra push to highlight this information and the success stories."
The coalition, founded in 1990 in the midst of the national health care reform debate, is composed of 90 organizations including corporations, medical groups, unions, consumer and religious organizations, and academic medical centers. The initiative grew out of a report, As Good as It Should Get: Making Health Care Better in the New Millennium, commissioned by the coalition and written by Donald Berwick, MD, founder and president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston.
Berwick cited examples of clinicians and hospitals that have improved care and saved money. But he notes that innovation and quality improvement at individual institutions doesn’t spread nationally.
"Not only do the particles of excellence lie lonely, unduplicated, and not spread, but not even one organization has yet had the ability, or perhaps the courage, to collect these many exciting innovations into a new whole," he says.
The coalition plans to release its first report in mid-1999, with a second report by the end of the year. "We hope we will be releasing at least two reports per year," says Miller. "There will be complimentary activities surrounding those reports, such as shorter fact sheets and forums for the media and other groups to highlight the findings."
The coalition also plans to track the use of the reports, although it’s not yet clear how that will be done.
Editor’s note: For a copy of the report, contact the National Coalition on Health Care, 555 13th St. NW, Washington, DC 20004. Telephone: (202) 637-6830. World Wide Web: http://www.nchc.org.
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