Patient-Centered Care

Quality Field Notes: Regional Collaboratives Can Improve the Value of Local Health Care

Quality Field Notes features key lessons learned by regional Alliances of clinicians, patients, and payers in Aligning Forces for Quality communities as they work to transform local health care and provide models for national reform. The latest topic in this series focuses on regional collaboratives. Regional collaboratives provide unlikely partners—including purchasers, payers, consumer advocates, clinicians, and others—a neutral setting in which collective goals and actionable strategies can be established. For the past eight years...

Will I Be Able to Hold My Newborn Daughter?

During the summer of 2013, Nathan Hunkins had reached a pinnacle in his life. He had a great job, his wife was almost nine months pregnant, and they had just closed on their first house. As Hunkins was packing to move, he missed the bottom stair, lunged forward, and put his right hand through a glass window. After more than six hours of surgery, he woke up and asked his surgeon what happened. His surgeon delivered the good and bad news—the surgeons made a full repair, but such injuries can result in limited functionality. Hunkins lost it emotionally, a scene that repeated at...

The Four Stages of Grief, for Doctors

Nathan Wilson, a self-identified “qualitologist,” said that “nothing will agitate a group of physicians more than introducing patient experience surveys into their practice,” despite the benefits of incorporating the patient voice. When patient experience surveys were initially piloted, the results were positive. But, when the program expanded, Wilson found that physicians experienced the “four stages of grieving:” denial, fear, anger, and acceptance. Wilson’s group used the data, and the physicians with the worst patient satisfaction scores...

Who's Doing the Heavy Lifting with Quality Information?

Lisa Lamkins’ son is obsessed with two things: weight lifting and his cystic acne. Lamkins went to the Internet in search of a quality weight-lifting bench and a good dermatologist. Which task do you think was simpler? Lamkins likened her experience in searching for a dermatologist to her experience as a consumer representative with the Wisconsin Alliance. During meetings, acronyms flew right over her head. She advocated for easy-to-use, easy-to-understand, and easy-to-interpret health information. Consumers too often have to do the heavy lifting in assessing health care quality...

Helping At-Risk Patients Change Their Outlook

Health care leaders in and around Buffalo are improving how vulnerable patients in the area’s “safety net” clinics receive their health care. By working closely with diverse patient groups, frontline clinicians are helping patients with diabetes modify their diets, develop lasting exercise regimens and change the way they manage their health. These efforts are led by the P2 Collaborative of Western New York, one of RWJF’s Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q) communities, which has brought together providers, patients, employers and insurers to help improve...

Physician Practices Turn Patients into Partners

Health care leaders in South Central Pennsylvania are turning patients into partners in their own care, taking them behind the scenes at local medical practices to get their insights on how to create a better health care system. Participating patients report higher levels of “activation” than other practices, while medical practices are getting unique feedback into how to improve the way they deliver care. These efforts are led by AF4Q-SCPA, one of RWJF’s Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q) communities, which has brought together providers, patients, employers and...

Quality Field Notes: How to Build a Sustainable Patient Experience Program

Quality Field Notes features key lessons learned by regional Alliances of clinicians, patients, and payers in Aligning Forces for Quality communities as they work to transform local health care and provide models for national reform. The latest topic in this series focuses on patient experience. Patient experience surveys, particularly those that use validated questions such as the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare...

Caring for the Costliest Patients: Better Care, Better Settings

By now, it is well known that “super-utilizers” account for only five percent of patients but accrue more than 60 percent of health care costs. These patients make frequent trips to hospital emergency rooms or have repeated inpatient hospital stays, resulting in costly health care, but not necessarily high-quality care.

Aligning Forces for Quality...

Redesigning Primary Care Helps Fill Critical Gaps

The Alliance for Health in Grand Rapids, Michigan, one of RWJF’s Aligning Forces for Quality communities, has been working to close gaps in primary care by linking up patients with depression and other related conditions with care managers. These care managers connect these patients with community services and resources, and help them navigate their journey through a complex health care system.

These efforts are part of a larger primary care transformation in West Michigan, designed to improve care for this vulnerable population. ...

Care Transitions Gain Ground

Patients in Western New York hospitals are having less fraught transitions from the hospital to home thanks to a community initiative. Under the leadership of the P2 Collaborative, 10 hospitals and eight community-based organizations have banded together to reduce avoidable hospital readmissions. Contracted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services through the Community-based Care Transitions Program (CCTP), the coalition provides coaching services to Medicare Fee-for-Service patients who are at risk for readmission to the hospital after an acute care...

Impact