Archive for the ‘End-of-Life Care’ Category

NCQA Looking for Ix “Quality Profiles”

Friday, May 29th, 2009

I received the following request from NCQA yesterday for the IxCenter to reach out to our collaborators for submissions to Quality Profiles since NCQA recognizes that information therapy (Ix) is a widely used strategy for quality improvement using HIT to address the 6 priority areas below.

Quality Profiles is published annually by NCQA. The overall goal of this series is to provide health care organizations and employers with a rich, up-to-date collection of quality improvement resources, illustrated through best practices, to use as a motivation and foundation for new program development. The seventh edition of Quality Profiles will align with the newly announced national health priorities as defined by the National Priorities Partnership. By highlighting successful ways organizations have incorporated HIT into their patient care processes, this edition of Quality Profiles will help to continue building on the momentum for HIT adoption and implementation.We will include case studies from organizations that will showcase how HIT was used to successfully impact one or more of these 6 areas:

  1. Patient & family engagement
  2. Population health
  3. Safety
  4. Care coordination
  5. Palliative & end-of life care
  6. Overuse

For those organizations that submit applications that involve Ix initiatives to Quality Profiles, we’d appreciate you sharing your best practices with the IxCenter as well. We are in the process of building a methodical library of Ix research, and are collecting as much research as we can both from the peer-reviewed literature and the more organic innovations being developed.

Posted in End-of-Life Care, Engaging Consumers, Ix Strategies, Market Rewards/Reimbursement Issues, Patient Safety | No Comments »

Engage with Grace

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
A special post from Alexandra Drane and the Engage with Grace Team

We make choices throughout our lives - where we want to live, what types of activities will fill our days, with whom we spend our time. These choices are often a balance between our desires and our means, but at the end of the day, they are decisions made with intent. But when it comes to how we want to be treated at the end our lives, often we don’t express our intent or tell our loved ones about it.

This has real consequences. 73% of Americans would prefer to die at home, but up to 50% die in hospital. More than 80% of Californians say their loved ones “know exactly” or have a “good idea” of what their wishes would be if they were in a persistent coma, but only 50% say they’ve talked to them about their preferences. But our end of life experiences are about a lot more than statistics. They’re about all of us.

So the first thing we need to do is start talking. Engage With Grace: The One Slide Project was designed with one simple goal: to help get the conversation about end of life experience started. The idea is simple: Create a tool to help get people talking. One Slide, with just five questions on it. Five questions designed to help get us talking with each other, with our loved ones, about our preferences.And we’re asking people to share this One Slide – wherever and whenever they can…at a presentation, at dinner, at their book club. Just One Slide, just five questions.

Lets start a global discussion that, until now, most of us haven’t had. Here is what we are asking you: Download The One Slide and share it at any opportunity – with colleagues, family, friends. Think of the slide as currency and donate just two minutes whenever you can. Commit to being able to answer these five questions about end of life experience for yourself, and for your loved ones. Then commit to helping others do the same. Get this conversation started. Let’s start a viral movement driven by the change we as individuals can effect…and the incredibly positive impact we could have collectively. Help ensure that all of us - and the people we care for - can end our lives in the same purposeful way we live them.

Just One Slide, just one goal. Think of the enormous difference we can make together.

Posted in End-of-Life Care | No Comments »