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The Commonwealth Fund and AcademyHealth are pleased to announce the launch of the State Quality Improvement Institute, which will help nine selected states improve the quality of their health care systems.
The primary goals of the Quality Institute are to:
provide customized support to states that are seriously considering substantial quality improvement efforts;
assess current challenges facing individual states;
identify appropriate diagnostic and implementation tools, analyze possible approaches and consider policy tradeoffs, and revise or refine current state-specific plans; and
give state participants the opportunity to network and discuss their own experiences and best practices.
States selected for the Quality Institute are Colorado, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. Based on the interests of the accepted state teams, the kick-off meeting will focus primarily on indicators from the Commission on a High Performance Health System's National Scorecard on U.S. Health System Performance, 2008, related to getting the right care, coordinated care, and avoidable hospital use.
The Quality Institute will begin in June 2008 with an intensive kick-off meeting where states will participate in a highly interactive, team-based process for developing policy and program recommendations. After the meeting, states will have an opportunity to participate in ongoing technical assistance activities. A series of publicly available reports and issue briefs will be created to share lessons learned with all states working toward quality improvement.