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.

Improving Health Through Health Information Technology

Grants awarded to 27 Public Health Training Centers

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today announced the award of $16.8 million to support 27 Public Health Training Centers (PHTC) at schools of public health and other public or non-profit institutions across the country.  The PHTC Program helps improve the public health system by enhancing skills of the current and future public health workforce. Institutions accredited to provide graduate or specialized training in public health are eligible for funding.  Most of the funding – $15.4 million – is made available by the Prevention and Public Health Fund included as part of the Affordable Care Act.

“Today’s awards represent a dramatic increase in support for Public Health Training Centers,” said Secretary Sebelius.  “Investing in prevention and public health is the foundation for improving the health and well-being of all Americans.”

Funded organizations (1) plan, develop, operate and evaluate projects that support goals established by the Secretary in preventive medicine, health promotion and disease prevention; or (2) improve access to and quality of health services in medically underserved communities. Other PHTC activities include assessing the learning needs of the public health workforce; providing accessible training; and working with organizations to meet strategic planning, education, and resource needs.

“Whether facing public health emergencies such as natural disasters, or chronic conditions like obesity, a well-trained public health workforce is critical to ensuring the nation’s health and welfare,” said Mary K. Wakefield, Ph.D., R.N., administrator of HHS’ Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), which oversees the PHTC program.

Awards are listed below. For more information on HRSA’s health professions programs, visit http://bhpr.hrsa.gov/.

Beacon Community Program adds Cincinnati and Southeastern Michigan

The Greater Cincinnati HealthBridge, Inc., serving a 16-county area spanning three states, will work with its partners to build upon an advanced health information exchange to deploy new quality improvement and care coordination initiatives focusing on patients with pediatric asthma and adult diabetes. This program will use health IT tools and resources to provide streamlined and secure clinical information and decision support tools to physicians, health systems, federally qualified health centers, and critical access hospitals. The community collaboration will also provide patients and their families with timely access to data, knowledge, and tools to make more informed decisions and to manage their own health and health care. Healthbridge also is a health information exchange and regional extension center.

The Southeastern Michigan Health Association and its community partners will focus its efforts on preventing and better managing diabetes using health IT tools and resources. Specifically, this effort will focus on coordinating care across health care settings by improving the availability of patient information at the point of care, redesigning patient care work processes, and applying quality improvement and other change management strategies to improve the quality and efficiency of diabetes care in the greater Detroit area. The $16.2 million award will be used to create the Southeast Michigan Beacon Community Collaborative, which will leverage existing and additional technologies across health care settings to improve information sharing, continuity of care and improve the quality and safety of care for underserved patients with chronic diabetes in Detroit, Hamtramck, Highland Park, Dearborn and Dearborn Heights, Mich. According to SEMBCC, diabetes has a very high prevalence among this target population, 12.8 percent of adults, or 93,000 people.

Beacon Communities Demonstrating Meaningful Use of Health IT

More information about Beacon Communities can be found at: http://Healthit.hhs.gov/Programs/Beacon.

For information about other HHS Recovery Act programs, see http://www.hhs.gov/recovery

Beacon Community Program

A grant program for communities to build and strengthen their health information technology (health IT) infrastructure and exchange capabilities. These communities will demonstrate the vision of a future where hospitals, clinicians, and patients are meaningful users of health IT, and together the community achieves measurable improvements in health care quality, safety, efficiency, and population health.