Value-driven health care public-private collaboratives

Answer:

Regional public-private collaboration is essential to the success of this initiative.  At its core, health care is local.  It is provided in a diverse range of environments that differ in their history, resources, populations served, market characteristics, and medical cultures.  Because of this diversity, the most effective steps to achieving lasting improvements in health care require a critical mass of support from community stakeholders - including health care providers, consumers, payers and purchasers - investing their time and resources toward shared, meaningful, actionable goals.

Employers are already involved in numerous collaboratives across the country.   The relationships formed in these collaboratives provide the foundation for employers, health insurance plans, providers, and consumers to work together to improve health care.   

Regional public-private collaboratives are also working on the ability to share clinical data for quality measurement and reporting between and among collaboratives.  For example, the National Health Information Network (NHIN) is enabling twelve regional public-private collaboratives to exchange clinical data for quality measurement and reporting.

Employers who are interested in a broad overview of provider performance are encouraged to participate in a new Medicare project through which Medicare claims data will be aggregated with claims data from other payors, and in some cases State Medicaid programs and providers, in order to produce comprehensive information on the quality of provider services.  This Better Quality Information for Medicare Beneficiaries (BQI) project is designed to improve the quality of Medicare services, and provide quality information to Medicare beneficiaries.  It is currently being implemented in six regional communities and CMS is also considering ways to expand this project to additional communities.

Learn more about pilot communities & programs: http://www.hhs.gov/valuedriven/pilot/

Last Updated: 5/8/2008