Minnesota’s health care providers are involved in a variety of quality initiatives ranging from implementation of systems-wide electronic medical records, encouraging patient safety, collecting and reporting statewide quality data, and financial incentives for quality.

Nationally, quality initiatives have concentrated on developing national standards for health information technology, evidence-based practice recommendations, and evidence-based performance measures. Coalitions of providers, payers, government agencies, and employers are working to minimize data collection and reporting burdens on providers and encourage implementation.

Quick links

Doc-IT Road Map

AHRQ Healthcare Quality Glossary

National Academy for State Health Policy Patient Safety Toolbox

American College of Physicians (ACP) Quality Improvement, Pay-for-Performance and Practice Redesign

Leapfrog Group Hospital Guide to Pay For Performance

Better Diabetes Care Toolbox

Hassle Factor Surveillance System

Minnesota quality organizations

HealthFront

A Bloomington-based nonprofit that promotes patient safety and consumer awareness about health care and gives an annual quality award to providers.
Resources for physicians: Web-based satisfaction measurement tool; confidential reports that allow clinics to improve quality and respond to health plan pay-for-performance initiatives.

Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement (ICSI)

ICSI does scientific literature reviews to create practice guidelines, provides quality-improvement consulting services to medical organizations, and conducts work groups on specific patient safety problems.
Resources for physicians: Guidelines, protocols, order sets, technology assessment reports, and downloadable patient education resources.

Minnesota Alliance for Patient Safety (MAPS)
A joint initiative by more than 50 health care organizations to improve patient safety in Minnesota.
Resources for physicians: Patient safety survey and incident report forms; certification training on creating a culture of safety; Let’s Talk, a 30-minute video; Patient Safety: Your Role, a brochure for patients; and Medical Technology Devices and Patient Safety, a one-page primer on creating safe systems.

MN Community Measurement
Community Measurement produces an annual report about medical group performance based on a review of health plan billing records and medical record abstracts. The MMA joined with the health plans to reconstitute MN Community Measurement as an independent nonprofit representing the interests of both physicians and insurers.
Resources for physicians: 2005 Health Care Quality Report.

Safest in America
A collaboration of 10 hospital systems in the Twin Cities and Rochester that strive to improve care by collecting and sharing data with each other about medical errors.

State of Minnesota

State government efforts to improve quality encompass legislation calling for a statewide electronic health record system by 2015 and the creation of Web sites providing information to providers and consumers, and specific guidance on health information technology.
Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s health care cabinet, composed of six state agency heads, is seeking to slow the rising cost of health care. The Smart Buy Alliance, which includes the State of Minnesota and other large, private purchasers of health care, plans to use its purchasing power to reward greater quality and value.
Resources for physicians:
Minnesota Health Information Web site: contains a comprehensive set of links to quality organization Web sites and includes an especially useful summary of Minnesota quality initiatives.
Minnesota e-Health Initiative: a public/private-sector effort to accelerate the use of health information technology in the state.

Stratis Health

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) contracts with Stratis to serve as Minnesota’s Medicare Quality Improvement Organization. Stratis works to improve health care by helping providers discover and implement evidence-based practices.
Resources for physicians: CMS data listing aggregate numbers on how Minnesota hospitals compare with national quality measures, newsletters on quality-related issues, and materials and training on evidence-based medicine and process improvements. Stratis also provides free consulting on implementing an electronic medical record system to primary care providers through the CMS-sponsored DOQ-IT program.

National organizations

Ambulatory care Quality Alliance (AQA)

In September 2004, the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), the American College of Physicians (ACP), America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), joined together to lead a collaborative effort for determining, how to most effectively and efficiently improve performance measurement, data aggregation and reporting in the ambulatory care setting.

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

A federal agency that sponsors and conducts research designed to improve health care.
Resources for physicians: White papers on a range of research topics, data on hospital performance, and reports on other quality-related topics.

National Guideline Clearinghouse site

National Quality Measures Clearinghouse site

American Medical Association (AMA)

The AMA is involved in several quality improvement initiatives including:
AMA’s Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement, which works with the national medical specialty societies and quality organizations to develop evidence-based performance measures.
Resources for physicians: Clinical performance measures for conditions such as hypertension, depression, and diabetes. Information on pay for performance, including the report Pay for Performance: A Physician’s Guide to Evaluating Incentive Plans, the video Pay for Performance: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, and a white paper on pay for performance.

ECRI (formerly the Emergency Care Research Institute)

A nonprofit research agency and consulting firm focusing on health care technology and quality management.
Resources for physicians: Consulting services, access to medical device safety reports, and a repository of medical device incident and hazard information.

Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (H-CUPnet)

The largest collection of hospital care data in the United States. The data shed light on hospital utilization, access, charges, quality, and outcomes.
Resources for physicians: Information about cost, length of stay, and mortality for hospitalizations categorized by illness or procedures at a regional or state level but not at the individual hospital level.

Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)

A nonprofit that strives to turn promising ideas for improving patient care into action through improving hospital care.
Resources for physicians: Web-based training; provider teams that test ideas; the Improvement Action Network; white papers on quality; and reading recommendations. IHI’s Web site also has online tools that allow providers to create and track their own quality measures, assess the likelihood that a process will fail and harm a patient, and measure adverse drug events over time. It offers guidelines for implementing the different elements of the 100,000 Lives campaign.

Institute of Medicine of the National Academies (IOM)

The IOM is part of the National Academy of Sciences. Hardly a quality discussion occurs without mention of the IOM’s two reports released in 1999 and 2001, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century.
Resources for physicians: Reports that address health care quality issues.

Joint Commission International Center for Patient Safety

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) recently launched this patient-safety effort.
Resources for physicians: Information on the most frequent types of reported sentinel events and their causes in the Sentinel Event Alert newsletter; information on how to meet JCAHO’s patient safety goals, and listings of and links to other patient safety organizations.

The Leapfrog Group

A coalition of employers that provides health care benefits to 34 million Americans, the Leapfrog Group aims to use its purchasing power to improve the quality, safety, and value of health care.
Resources for physicians: An easy-to-use search engine showing how Minnesota hospitals meet Leapfrog’s standards.

National Center for Patient Safety

A center created to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA’s) patient safety efforts.
Resources for physicians: Reports and information about how the VA has tackled various safety issues such as preventing prescription errors.

National Patient Safety Foundation

A nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to improving patient safety and reducing medical errors.
Resources for physicians: A Web site offering learning modules on patient safety topics for which physicians can earn CME credit (www.npsf.org/html/mcw/physicians.html), a searchable bibliography of more than 5,500 patient safety articles, and other materials.

National Quality Forum

This private membership organization’s mission is to improve health care through endorsement of consensus-based national standards for measurement and public reporting of health care performance data around whether care is safe, timely, beneficial, patient-centered, equitable, and efficient. The forum wants to be the principal body that endorses national health care performance measures, quality indicators, and/or quality-of-care standards.