Frontiers of Health Services Management - Summer 2014 - (Page 23)

Achieving the Triple Aim UH set out to achieve the institute for Healthcare improvement's triple aim by working toward developing a culture of quality, defining the role of governance in our acos, and creating a structure by which to support coordinated care. each of these areas of focus is discussed in detail in the following sections. The Importance of a Quality Culture UH's commitment to providing the highest-quality care is critical to its success in achieving the triple aim's goals of improving population health, improving each patient's care experience, and reducing or controlling the cost of care. an essential objective for us to fulfill was to gain significant, high-profile recognition for our quality success, as the momentum created by national awards engages all of the stakeholders in population health. for example, they have led physicians to trust our data and be willing to work with our data analysts in maintaining high-quality and actionable data. We could not attain the accolades and subsequent trust of our providers, however, without the ceo conveying a clear message that quality is a top priority and that mediocrity is unacceptable. Management established quality as a priority by (1) creating the UH Quality institute to increase collaboration and effectiveness, (2) creating the role of chief quality officer, (3) incorporating quality and safety into the research and teaching missions of the hospital, and (4) setting clear and aligned quality goals at all levels that are tied to management and employee incentive plans. as a result of this focus, since 2003, UH has demonstrated dramatic and sustained improvement in national rankings for quality and safety. awards and accomplishments achieved at UHcMc include winning the american Hospital association-McKesson Quest for Quality Prize; becoming Magnet certified; improving in Thomas F. Zenty III, FACHE; Er ic J. Bieber; and Eliza beth R. Hammack * 23 f e a t u r e leader in population health management would require us to have expertise in pediatric, adult, and geriatric population management. this understanding ultimately led us to apply to the centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (cMS) Medicare Shared Savings Program as a Medicare aco and to cMS's center for Medicare & Medicaid innovation (innovation center) for a Health care innovation award, which provided the foundation for a pediatric aco (presented as a case study later in this article). We have since built on our earlier work to collaborate on commercial acos with large national insurers. UH's population health management initiative has evolved through the experience of our various acos, but throughout the effort, UH has sought to use acos to deliver exceptional quality of care for all patients. in this article, we describe how the pursuit of ever-higher quality has aided our acos and how our acos are able to facilitate achievement of our organizational quality goals. While a number of articles in the literature have focused on clinical integration within acos, here we focus on how our careful attention to creating infrastructure has served as a foundation for meaningful governance and aided our operational goals and expansion, providing scalability across the different acos and the populations served, including the novel work performed within our pediatric aco, one of the few in the United States. By building on our commitment to our patients and improving our relationships with them through service and taking advantage of new technology, the aco connects patients to the high-quality care that UH is designed to provide.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Frontiers of Health Services Management - Summer 2014

Table of Contents

Frontiers of Health Services Management - Summer 2014