Qual-IT - July 2007 | Archived

The Fund's Quality Strategies Initiative was launched in 2003 to identify opportunities for coordinated efforts to advance the quality agenda in New York. Given the wide variety of activities taking place at the state and local levels, how can these disparate efforts be organized in a more purposeful way to achieve broad health care systems change? How do we determine which strategies make a difference? And what has been learned about defining objectives and overcoming obstacles to sustainable quality improvement? These and other critical questions will be addressed by "Quality Strategies/Quality Programs," the Fund-sponsored conference taking place on July 17.

Setting the stage for the day's presentations and discussions, Cathy Schoen, senior vice president of the Commonwealth Fund and executive research director of its Commission on a High Performance Health System, will lay out a broad agenda for quality assessment and improvement. Such systemic improvement will require not only alignment of the factors noted in the recent Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study described in the June issue of Qual-IT but also measures such as ensuring universal health insurance coverage and developing the health care workforce essential to patient-centered primary care. The Commission has already developed a national scorecard to assess progress on these measures, and will soon release the first state scorecard for high-performance health systems.

Beyond this broad context, the conference will also feature panels on several specific issues, including measurement and improvement of chronic care quality, collaborative efforts to advance hospital quality improvement, innovative models addressing organizational culture and professional competencies, and collaborative efforts to use HIT to improve health care quality.

Complete conference information and online registration is available at http://www.uhfnyc.org/calendar_contact3160/calendar_contact_show.htm?doc_id=484284.