Stakeholder Awareness of Beacon Program Services Surveyed by AcademyHealth, The Commonwealth Fund and ONC
To ensure that the information needs and values of key community leaders are better understood by the Beacon Communities, AcademyHealth, with support from The Commonwealth Fund and in collaboration with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), conducted a series of telephone interviews with select national and community stakeholders.
The 17 Beacon Communities are focusing on specific and measureable improvement goals in three areas that are central to delivery system reform and improvement — quality, efficiency, and population health — to demonstrate the ability of health IT to transform local health care systems.
Most national stakeholders—though not tracking specific activities within individual communities — were aware of the program’s purpose, its emphasis on quality, cost, and population health, and its focus on specific disease areas such as diabetes and asthma.
Nearly all expressed interest in receiving more information on the activities of the Beacon Program, including updates on the overall project, as well as highlights from the individual communities. Several suggested that a quarterly newsletter or report from ONC would be a convenient and effective mechanism for these updates.
As noted, one major challenge for the Beacon Communities is the relatively short timeframe for the implementation of their initiatives and recognition of their impact. The Beacons should proactively address the unmet demand for information regarding their efforts among their stakeholders, including:
• Discussing implementation obstacles and modifications designed to overcome initial challenges;
• Sharing preliminary impact data and related stories that provide a glimpse at future outcomes;
• Demonstrating the role of health IT in integrating care and improving efficiencies across providers and health systems;
• Working toward more rigorous analyses that provide valid measures of improvements in care; and
• Considering the most appropriate format and level of information that should be shared with specific audiences.
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