How collaboration can push healthcare reform forward
By - In an effort to improve patient care across Pennsylvania healthcare facilities, Capital BlueCross and the Health Care Improvement Foundation (HCIF) joined together to create a collaborative – the first of its kind in central Pennsylvania. The collaborative plans to improve health care safety, outcomes, and the overall patient experience, according to a Capital BlueCross statement.
The collaborative will focus on improving one health initiative at a time, and health care system participants voted to first work on improving palliative care.
Dr. Jennifer Chambers, Capital BlueCross senior vice president and chief medical officer, discussed the initiative with RevCycleIntelligence and explained that this type of collaborative will help with education and driving toward goals of shared decision making between the physician and a patient.
“This is an opportunity for us to really drive community health through our organization by facilitating these discussions to happen,” Chambers explained. “We are not the facilitator per say but we get the folks in the room together and help develop that crucible where the conversation can take place.”
According to Chambers, patients can sometimes be intimidated by the healthcare community. An individual might go into an appointment and have a list of questions, but for one reason or another, he or she does not ask them. One of the goals of the collaborative is to provide the healthcare community with an opportunity to discuss ways they can encourage two-way conversations with patients to take place, Chambers said.
The collaborative is also highly focused on what the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) refers to as the Triple Aim, according to Chambers.
“IHI defines it as experience of care, quality of care received and the medical value – value for each dollar spent in the healthcare arena,” Chambers said. “That’s what we’re looking to achieve in the health of our community through this initiative.”
Chambers added that more collaboratives could begin to appear across the country. Initiatives like this will help to raise the bar for all the hospitals participating without taking away their individualized approaches, she explained. Additionally, communication will drive everything forward, as individual hospitals can select the path they want to follow and drive toward improving those outcomes. Then, they share those best practices among all the hospital participants, Chambers said.
“A lot of different health insurance plans – the payers – have quality incentives or quality improvement programs that might be unique in some aspects but shared in other aspects with other payers,” Chambers said. “This type of collaborative raises the tides for all patients, and it also provides for that shared goal setting with all of the hospitals.”
It is important to note that the hospitals involved in the collaborative were aware of what things they needed to improve as a group, according to Chambers. The hospitals needed to decide what was important so they could work toward driving better health and quality of care in the community.
“This collaborative truly impacts the entire community and not just Capital Blue Cross members,” Chambers said. “We think that because it’s the first of its kind in central Pennsylvania that we’ll have a lot of lessons learned at the end: what worked well, what didn’t, and how we can start to plan for the next collaborative and whatever topic that may be.”
