Chapter VI. Building Communication and Dissemination Infrastructure
This chapter examines the communications and dissemination
infrastructure of the Collaborative, based on information collected during
round three of our interviews14 (bottom of Figure VI.1). As in previous chapters, we first present a
summary of our findings. We then describe the rationale and background of
Collaborative communications, followed by a discussion the Collaborative's
major communication and dissemination activities in Phase I. We end by
discussing the perspectives of participating firms and other organizations on
communications support, including the successes and challenges, and what the
Phase I experience highlights as important issues to consider in Phase II.
A. Overview of Findings
Firms, support organizations, and sponsors alike
generally had a positive assessment of the communication and dissemination
activities of Phase I of the Collaborative, although many recognized that there
was little to communicate or disseminate yet and use of existing communications
materials appeared limited. Nonetheless, the communication work done over the
last year—which included the development of the NHPC logo, materials, and
standardized messaging—was viewed as an important foundation for Phase II, when
NHPC (and perhaps individual firms) will have more to report about their
activities in the area of reducing disparities.
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B. Rationale for Communications and Dissemination
Reaching out beyond the Collaborative to other audiences is a
core activity, one that will have an influence on the Collaborative's overall
ability to expand health plans' awareness of and attention to the issue of
disparities. Key support organizations planned to support this focus in their
own ways. For example, CHCS had plans to develop a toolkit and also to share
lessons more broadly with plans as part of their upcoming Quality Summit on
reducing racial/ethnic disparities. RAND hoped to work with Collaborative
members to publish articles describing the Collaborative's experience and
encouraging attention to these issues. Each participating organization (firms
and nonfirms alike) also had its own interests in how communications about the
Collaborative were to be handled.
In summer 2005, RWJF funded GMMB to provide communications
support to the Collaborative. RWJF staff indicated that the primary goal of
the communications contract was to help provide consistency and standardization
in how the Collaborative was described externally to stakeholder organizations,
policymakers, and others, and to establish a "brand identity" (including a
logo). These goals were fairly simple and straightforward, and RWJF staff did
not expect much media attention during this phase of the Collaborative.
The communications support and tools provided by GMMB were
designed primarily for firm leadership participating in the Collaborative,
although communications or public relations staff at most firms were also
involved in the development of Collaborative materials—both so they could
provide feedback and fully understand the purpose of the materials.
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C. Major Communication and Dissemination Activities
Shortly after the start of its contract, GMMB developed a
communications plan that established a series of guidelines and goals for the
Collaborative's communication activities. The communications plan also provided
some boilerplate language describing the Collaborative. The core messages of
the Collaborative were as follows:
- In response to years of well-documented and persistent
racial and ethnic disparities in our nation's health care system, nine leading
health insurance companies have combined forces to form the National Health
Plan Collaborative to seek out and test best practices to address the problem.
While others in America's health care system—purchasers, patients and
providers—also have critical roles to play, the Collaborative represents a
collective effort by health insurance companies to do their part to solve this
unacceptable problem.
- The Collaborative is a groundbreaking project bringing
together major health insurance companies with organizations from the public
and private sector to identify ways in which the quality of health care can be
improved for racially and ethnically diverse patient populations.
Participating health insurance companies are exploring interventions aimed at
communities, providers, and other stakeholders. The initial focus of the
Collaborative is on improving the quality of care for patients with diabetes.
Over the next year and a half, the National Health Plan Collaborative will work
to engage other health care decisionmakers—major health care insurance
purchasers, health care providers and policymakers—to join ongoing efforts to
find solutions to racial and ethnic disparities in health care.
- In January 2007, strategies and lessons learned from the
Collaborative will be shared with other health care decisionmakers and
leaders.
The communications plan also made several recommendations
about venues for disseminating the Collaborative's work (including the
roundtable briefing and America's Health Insurance Plans' Building Bridges
conference, described in more detail below). Finally, it also indicated that
GMMB would provide members with information of interest to the Collaborative as
a whole, thereby creating a vehicle for firms to discuss publications and other
documents related to disparities—both those generated by Collaborative and
those developed externally. One example was Nicole Lurie's editorial in the New
England Journal of Medicine, which listed Collaborative members (Lurie
2005). Another example was a paper on by Asch et al. (2006) that was
externally generated but of interest to many firms participating in the
Collaborative because of its controversial finding that differences in health
care quality by sociodemographic subgroups are small in comparison to the gap
between observed and desirable levels of health care quality for each
subgroup.
Per the communications plan, GMMB produced several tools in
Phase I of the Collaborative. The first was the toolkit designed to establish
standard messaging and branding of the National Health Plan Collaborative.
Produced in December 2005, the toolkit included a brochure on NHPC, a list of
frequently asked questions (the answers to which firms can use to address
inquiries about the Collaborative), a racial disparities fact sheet, and
information on usage of the Collaborative's logo.15 The toolkit also provided talking points about the Collaborative for firm leadership to use in public
forums, and included a Microsoft Powerpoint® presentation template with the
Collaborative's logo and other basic information. A few members of the
Collaborative used the materials in the toolkit—along with direct support from
GMMB—to prepare for an Alliance for Health Reform briefing in Washington, DC, in late 2005.16
GMMB also created the Collaborative's Website, which was made
public in February 2006 (http://www.chcs.org/NationalHealthPlanCollaborative/index.html).
Drawing on many of the materials included in the NHPC toolkit, this Website
provides basic information on the Collaborative, including its mission,
participants, activities, a fact sheet on disparities, and a list of frequently
asked questions. No information is available about use of the site (such as
the number of hits or user sessions), although support organizations suspect
that Collaborative participants are probably the most frequent users of the
site.
The most prominent communications activity during Phase I was
the Collaborative's roundtable briefing in Washington, DC, in June 2006. (This
briefing was held immediately before the start of RWJF's second annual
conference on disparities and quality of care, in the same venue.) As part of
this one-and-a-half hour briefing, senior leadership from AHRQ and RWJF
introduced the session and lead contacts from each of the nine participating
plans presented briefly on their firm's activities as part of the
Collaborative. Over 50 people attended this briefing in person, and over 200
people registered to listen to the Webcast of the briefing via the NHPC
Website.17
One of the final communications activities in Phase I of the
Collaborative was a presentation at America's Health Insurance Plans' (AHIP) Building
Bridges conference in early November 2006.18
Specifically, GMMB worked with AHIP and Collaborative participants to organize
a session in which lead contacts from three participating firms, along with
Stephen Somers from CHCS, each presented on various aspects of the
Collaborative. GMMB also recently produced a summary report on the
Collaborative—which drew from MPR's interim report and other sources—for
distribution at the conference.19
The report includes information on who is participating in the Collaborative,
what participants came together to accomplish, activities to date, and next
steps. The summary report culminates with a "call to action," which makes several
recommendations to the health care community, including (1) standardizing
primary data collection criteria, (2) encouraging other health plans to
participate in Collaborative initiatives, and (3) encouraging other health
plans to address the problem of disparities.20
Each core support organization is also engaged in using its
own strengths and resources to further disseminate the Collaborative's message
and reach target audiences in a variety of ways. For example, RAND and CHCS
staff recently drafted a manuscript describing the Collaborative and its work
to date, which they will submit for publication to the American Journal of
Managed Care. In addition, although it is not an official Collaborative
activity, CHCS has included several Collaborative participants as presenters at
its upcoming Quality Summit on Improving Health Care for Racially and Ethnically
Diverse Populations in December 2006.
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D. Perspectives on Communications Support
Use of communications tools. Use of GMMB
tools and support varied somewhat by firm, although no firm appeared to be a
heavy user. While a few firms have contacted GMMB for additional copies of
toolkit materials or other support, staff from several firms noted that they
have not yet needed communications support because they have no concrete
actions yet to report and have not received any inquiries about the work. Most
firms did not use the Collaborative toolkit directly (although a few firms
circulated toolkit materials to staff internally); nonetheless, many appreciated
having the information available to them. A couple of firms suggested that the
toolkit could have had more information, such as specific examples for
communications staff of how the materials could be used. Use of the
Collaborative Website also appears to have been rather limited to date.
It is important to note that during Phase I, the
Collaborative's communication tools focused on policy issues rather than firms'
operational uses. In this phase, firms were generally not at a stage where
they could actively promote their interventions or other Collaborative
activities to key customers—such as purchasers, consumers and providers—and the
utility of these tools must be understood in that context.
Both firm and nonfirm perceptions on the roundtable briefing
in June 2006 were uniformly positive. All thought the briefing was a good way
to publicize the Collaborative's work and believed that GMMB played an
important role in presenting a unified message from the Collaborative as a
whole and standardizing the presentation format used by all firm
representatives.
Successes. Staff from several firms and
support organizations agreed that the communications work in Phase I was
helpful in setting up a foundation and allowing the Collaborative to be ready
for communications and dissemination in Phase II. Many saw establishing a
Collaborative logo and standardizing the message as a very positive
development. In the words of one lead contact, the Collaborative "got an
identity" from the communications work. Moreover, the communications work to
date—especially for the roundtable briefing in June 2006— helped firms to see
that the Collaborative's "message would have more power if they were all saying
the same thing consistently," according to one sponsor.
Almost all firms found GMMB to be professional, organized, and
helpful. Firm staff believed the materials for the roundtable briefing were
well done and commended GMMB for its help in preparing for the briefing and its
persistence in getting firms to present a unified message.
Challenges. The primary challenge to
date has been the relatively little activity about which to communicate at this
early stage of the Collaborative. In the words of one support organization
staff member, "the Collaborative has to have something to say before
communications can help." Most firms agreed that the ability to communicate
and disseminate was limited at this stage, and additional communication would
have been premature. As one firm representative suggested, "our first priority
is getting something solid done and rolling it out." Only after this point will
firms—and the Collaborative as a whole—have something significant to
communicate.
While RWJF charged GMMB with communicating a consistent and
unified message for the Collaborative as a whole, it is worth noting that firms
may have other distinct communication needs. Although firms are clearly
interested in promoting the work of the Collaborative externally, a couple of
the participating firms—all of which are large, complex organizations—were also
interested in communicating about the work within their own organizations. One
firm, for example, believed GMMB was substantially less helpful to individual
firms in communicating their own work on disparities—either internally or
externally—than promoting the Collaborative as a whole (the latter of which was
GMMB's charge).
Support and sponsor organizations noted that the competitive
dynamics between plans affected the group's ability to communicate, at least in
the earlier stages of Phase I. One support organization said it was initially
"extremely difficult to get them to communicate as a group, just given the
number of players involved"— and taking it one step further to communicate a
single unified message externally was even more challenging.
Several characteristics of participating firms also influenced
GMMB's ability to perform its communications function. For example, the size
of firms participating in NHPC has sometimes made it difficult for GMMB to know
if it reached the appropriate communications people. (Moreover, the chain of
command in these large firms often slowed response time to signing off on
Collaborative materials or other documents.) Another challenge involved
turnover among communications staff at several of the firms, which made it
difficult for GMMB to sustain relationships over time.
Perspectives Moving Forward. When asked
about the possible role of communications in Phase II of the Collaborative,
staff from many firms expressed an expectation for increased communications and
dissemination, as there will be more concrete activities to cover. Moreover,
consistent with findings elsewhere in this report, there is a strong perception
(among firms and nonfirms alike) that firms are becoming more comfortable
sharing with one another as a group, which is gradually improving communication
within the Collaborative. According to one support organization, this may give
the Collaborative more ability to speak collectively in Phase II. Finally,
staff from several firms indicated that employers/customers are getting more
interested in disparities and the actions health plans are taking to address
those disparities. If this trend continues, actively promoting the work of the
Collaborative may become more useful over time.
In terms of future communications activities, a few
communications staff stated that helping promote success stories as they become
available would be helpful in phase two. Other firm staff suggested that GMMB
could help them promote Collaborative activities within their firms
(Collaborative participants are large firms that typically need help
communicating internally.)
Sponsor organizations indicated that future communications
goals will become clearer as participating firms reach consensus on their
overall goals for Phase II. GMMB is currently preparing a proposal to RWJF for
communications activities in the Collaborative's next phase.
As the Collaborative moves into its next phase, one possible
tension in the communications realm involves organizations' desired focus
versus that of the Collaborative as a whole. While sponsors want to ensure
that the messages of the Collaborative are presented consistently to
policymakers and stakeholders, at least some of the firms may be just as concerned
with communicating firm-specific activities to other audiences—such as
purchasers, providers, and possibly consumers—that are key to firm success. As
the Collaborative moves into its next phase and reporting increases, it is
important to consider how these preferences might be aligned.
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