| RWJF
Awards Nine Communities Money To Support Novel Programs
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has
selected
nine local organizations to receive awards through the Aligning Forces
for Quality (AF4Q) Development Fund. The Development Fund supports
particularly innovative and exemplary practices for improving quality
in select regions.
The Development Fund provides local organizations
with
the opportunity to develop innovative practices in three focus areas:
health information technology (HIT), patient-centered care, and payment
reform.
"Health reform is a national issue but the impact
is
felt locally in hospitals and physician offices throughout our Aligning
Forces for Quality communities and what happens in one community has
the potential to inform others and significantly improve healthcare
nationwide," said Anne F. Weiss, director of the foundation’s
quality/equality team.
The nine AF4Q Development Fund award recipients
are:
HIT
- Wisconsin Department of Health & Family
Services
will work to leverage HIT to reduce avoidable emergency department
visits from patients with treatable primary care conditions.
- The Lovelace Clinic Foundation, Albuquerque,
will try
to measure the extent that a health information exchange reduces
duplicate diagnostic tests and how it is used by clinicians.
- Cincinnati’s HealthBridge will use
its
databases to work with primary care medical home practices to support
data integration, data reporting and other needed practice improvements
to promote connectivity and patient data integration.
Patient-Centered Care
- Minnesota’s Institute for Clinical
Systems
Improvement will engage patients in shared decision-making (SDM) during
the palliative care period and pilot new or existing SDM tools that
ensure active participation from patients.
- Oregon Health Care Quality Corp., Willamette
Valley,
will seek to facilitate change by embedding patients within six local
health plans and delivery systems. Technical assistance will include
on-site coaching and development of a system to support patient
advisors.
- Quality Counts, Maine, will strengthen consumer
presence in ambulatory care by engaging consumers directly in
governance and helping transform 26 primary care medical homes
practices to become more patient-centered. Consumers will be trained
and serve on Patient-Family Leadership Teams in the community.
Payment Reform
- Oregon Health Care Quality Corp. will establish
community-wide specific measures, measurement processes and
implementation details for a reformed care payment system to add
severity-adjusted care coordination payments and outcome-based bonuses
to existing fee-for-service payments in primary care practices.
- Puget Sound Health Alliance, Washington, will
bring
together public and private payers and providers to identify
reimbursement methods that align incentives around primary care medical
homes. The goal will be to develop specific payment reforms that
sustain a medical home model.
- Health Management Coalition Foundation,Maine,
will
try to identify unwarranted variation in cost and utilization for care
that is preference sensitive, supply sensitive and effective. The
ultimate goal is advance a new incentivized payment model.
Address: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Route 1
and College Road East, P.O. Box 2316, Princeton, NJ 08543; (877)
843-7953. www.rwjf.org.
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