Regional healthcare improvement organizations are helping to drive the agenda for transformation of the U.S. healthcare system by bringing together health care payors, health care plans, health care providers, and users of healthcare in collaborative efforts to improve the health care systems in their regions. Regional healthcare improvement organizations mobilize community resources to solve key problems where markets fail to promote the continuous creation of higher value through improved quality and access at lower cost. By facilitating participation by and support from providers, insurers, employers, unions, consumer groups, and government agencies, these organizations are able to effect solutions that no market participant could achieve individually.
Regional healthcare improvement organizations are organized around a defined program of action for improving healthcare in their respective regions, including one or more of the following five areas:
- public reporting of healthcare performance;
- achieving agreement on how to prevent and manage diseases;
- assisting healthcare delivery organizations to improve their processes and systems of care;
- encouraging changes in payment systems to make them performance-based and to better align them with rational decisions about care;
- enabling provider organizations to exchange electronic healthcare information, including accelerating adoption of electronic health records.
The scale of regional innovation needed to transform American healthcare demands, however, that regions coordinate their efforts to transfer successes rapidly. This coordination will leverage limited local resources to implement successful solutions more rapidly, avoid duplication of development work, and align performance and infrastructure standards.
The Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement (NRHI) was founded in 2004 to share learnings among five leading regional collaboratives: the Pacific Business Group on Health (PBGH), Massachusetts Health Quality Partners (MHQP), the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative (PRHI), the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement (ICSI) / Minnesota Community Measurement (MNCM), and the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ). The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, and the California HealthCare Foundation are providing financial support for NRHI.
NRHI's goals are to to accelerate the formation and efficacy of regional initiatives through four key value drivers:
- Share practical knowledge among regional healthcare improvement organizations;
- Provide technical assistance to other regions seeking to establish or improve their own regional healthcare improvement organizations;
- Impact the national policy agenda based on the experience developed in improving healthcare at the regional level; and
- Serve as a clearinghouse for operational standards on quality and efficiency metrics.