Institute for Healthcare Improvement: Reducing Avoidable Emergency Department Visits

Participating Organizations

Central East Local Health Integration Network, Ontario, Canada
Primary Care Coalition of Montgomery County, Maryland
Humboldt Del Norte IPA, California
Mt. Auburn Cambridge IPA, Massachusetts
North Colorado Health Alliance
Finger Lakes Health System Agency, New York
British Columbia Partners Team, Canada
Providence Health, Oregon
Network Health Massachusetts
Milwaukee Health Care Partnership, Wisconsin

New Participants Are Welcome

Who Should Participate?

IHI is continuously recruiting for the Reducing Avoidable Emergency Department Visits prototyping initiative, which will run through January 2010. We are seeking to engage organizations that have already incorporated work on this topic into their strategic plans, are actively engaged in work that addresses avoidable ED visits, and are willing to commit to designating a patient population for additional design, focus, and testing.

Organizations we believe could be well-suited to join the prototyping effort include:

Large integrated care systems, such as HMOs, encompassing both financing and delivery systems
Health plans and insurance companies
Large hospital-centric integrated delivery systems
International groups in fixed funding environments
Public Health departments
Safety net organizations
Employer-based health systems
Regional health care collaboratives
Federally funded public sector health care organizations
Consumer/patient advocacy groups

We expect that a diverse group of organizations are appropriate to participate. Such organizations would have access to many parts of the overall health system to test promising changes and should bring exceptional skills in innovation and structured improvement methods. Prototyping work will be highly transparent, and sites must be willing to fully share their activities and results.

Expectations of participating organizations include the following:

Participating organizations will need to have access to many parts of the overall health system, or engage partners who can reach key settings in order to test changes.
Participating sites must have full support of their senior leadership, who should stay actively connected to the work. Ideally this project will be a recognized priority of the organization’s board of directors.
There should be an appointed high-level project leader to oversee the day-to-day activities and who has dedicated time for this work.
Participating organizations will need to have (or develop) measures that can detect changes in the level of unnecessary ED visits in their selected population(s).

IHI welcomes expressions of interest from a wide range of health care providers and other health-related organizations. Please contact Courtney Kaczmarsky at IHI to discuss this opportunity further (ckaczmarsky@ihi.org; 617-301-4925).