Institute for Healthcare Improvement: New Health Partnerships

About the New Health Partnerships Initiative

Increasing evidence shows us that engaged, informed patients achieve the best outcomes. They are more confident and better prepared to manage their illness — often more inspired to work with providers toward achieving shared health goals.

This "self-management" isn’t easy. It can involve understanding and following complex medical regimens and making difficult changes in lifestyle such as losing weight or exercising more. Patients need providers’ support, and too few today are equipped to offer it.

To accelerate the pace of change in this area, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has called on the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) to manage an ambitious, three-year, $3.75 million dollar national initiative called "New Health Partnerships: Improving Care by Engaging Patients." The initiative, supported in part by the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF), encompasses multi-level components directed by experts from leading organizations in chronic care and patient-centered care research, including the MacColl Institute for Healthcare Innovation at the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound Center for Health Studies, and the Institute for Family-Centered Care.

Within the "New Health Partnerships: Improving Care by Engaging Patients" initiative is the Quality Allies Learning and Innovation Community. This community is applying proven quality improvement methods and strategies in creative ways to boost the capacity of ambulatory care providers and patients and families to engage in productive, collaborative self-management support. The work was built on the achievements of six practices taking part in a Pilot Collaborative on Self-Management Support. Twenty ambulatory care teams are participating in the Quality Allies Community, each one, in turn, inviting patients and family members from their own communities to join as fundamental partners throughout the entire project. Together the teams are designing, testing, refining and spreading best-practices in self-management support.

Why Self-Management Support Is Important

Virtual Learning Community

Some of the most serious challenges — clinical, financial, and human — facing health care providers and organizations involve caring for patients facing chronic conditions such as asthma, diabetes, hypertension and HIV. Our care delivery system isn’t good at this; it’s geared to respond to conditions and events with finite parameters — clinical, financial, and human — such as heart attacks, injuries, and diseases that can be cured.

But health needs are changing dramatically, making this care model out of date. Today more people are living long lives with complex, ongoing health conditions. They’re dealing with problems that can’t be cured but can be managed successfully so they can stay out of the hospital and continue home, work, and community activities they cherish.

Making this happen takes new tools and approaches to care. Chronic care experts have made great strides toward improvements in this area, but implementation is moving slowly. One particular hurdle involves a subtle shift in roles: finding ways to successfully partner with patients to help them play an active role in their own care; to guide them in managing their condition day-by-day — their entire lives outside of the medical office. This concept can be a leap for providers, trained to diagnose, prescribe and take charge.

The New Health Partnerships initiative will help accelerate the pace of change in this important area.

Listen to the January 18, 2006, informational call about this program.

A growing research base, including a recent analysis by RAND’s Evidence-Based Practice Center completed for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), shows that collaborative self-management support (CSMS) interventions can have a significant positive effect on important health and behavioral outcomes for the chronically ill. Broad implementation of CSMS could be one of the best ways of improving outcomes for people with chronic health conditions. However, in spite of a growing research base, CSMS has not been consistently integrated into mainstream patient care settings. Often providers and payers are unaware of or are not convinced of the effectiveness of CSMS interventions. In addition, CSMS is challenging for health care providers to implement and successfully incorporate into their practices because it demands a fundamental shift in the values, attitudes, and work processes of providers, plans, and payers.

Teams in the New Health Partnerships Virtual Learning Community will address this need by planning and testing models that provider organizations can utilize to support CSMS approaches. The Virtual Community uses WebEx electronic and distance learning methods. Participants will adapt and use rapid-cycle quality improvement approaches taught by leading experts in self-management, quality improvement, and systems redesign to customize and implement evidence-based CSMS principles to their settings.

Download Charter for Virtual Community

For More Information

We encourage you to follow the work of these pioneering change agents in closing the gap between how we care for our chronically ill patients today and what dramatic improvements are possible tomorrow.

Visit the New Health Partnerships website at www.newhealthpartnerships.org

Read more in this story: IHI at Forefront of National Program to Advance Patient Self-Management of Care
Visit the Topics area for Emerging Content on Self-Management Support
Please address inquiries about the New Health Partnerships initiative to Cindy Betti-Sullivan, New Health Partnerships Project Manager, at cbetti@ihi.org