History
The Kentuckiana Health Alliance (KHA) was formed early in 2003 to improve community health through broad collaboration of key healthcare stakeholders and is convened by the UAW/Ford Community Healthcare Initiative. The Kentuckiana Health Alliance Quality Improvement Consortium (KHAQI-C), a subcommittee of KHA, was created to help promote best practices and to help physicians improve patient care in our region.
Background
With the growing emphasis on evidence-based medicine and multiple parties involved in guideline development, there are occasionally overlapping and conflicting materials, wide-ranging levels of coordination on content, format, distribution, measures, application, and differing levels of detail in materials. This often results in low utility of some guidelines and varied levels of community physician involvement and use.
Goals
The projec t goals for KHAQI-C are to improve patient outcomes and foster best-practice based care by collaboratively developing and implementing guidelines and measures. The Task Force coordinates and interfaces with current regional actions (e.g. GLMS Quality Improvement and Patient Safety committee, KY Health Quality Agenda, LouHIE, BTE, etc.).
Benefits
By collaboratively developing guidelines and measures, there will be increased coordination and decreased fragmentation in guideline use, content, format, and measures. Decreasing the variation of guidelines being sent to providers simplifies guideline usage and reduces the administrative burden of guideline development and updating. Collaborative development of measures will increase the consistency of measures and allows physicians to see their performance relative to their peers.
This project is modeled after the Kansas City Quality Improvement Organizations (KCQIC) www.kcqic.org. Below are excerpts from an article in The Kansas City Star in January 2006; click here for January 2006 Kansas City Star Article.
"'We've seen a significant improvement in clinical measures. Physicians are responding to the data, and patients are responding to their physicians,' said Gregg Laiben, a physician and a member of the Kansas City Quality Improvement Consortium, which produces the report cards. In 2002, the blood-sugar levels of more than a third of diabetic patients, 37.5 percent, were uncontrolled. By 2004, just 8.2 percent of patients had blood-sugar levels that were too high" (January 2006, The Kansas City Star).