Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality

From the President & CEO...
Participation has its rewards

Chris Queram,
President and CEO

We’re pleased to present the inaugural issue of our newsletter, News & Views. The newsletter will provide you with the latest news about the Collaborative and happenings in the world of health care performance measurement and improvement. We will also share our perspectives and those of our members, partners and the community. Most of all, we want this newsletter to be relevant, helpful and easy to read. To that end, we welcome your comments and suggestions as we look toward future editions.

The Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality’s members and partners share a common goal of improving patient care and the health of the community. As health care organizations become involved in our performance measurement and improvement efforts, many report to us that they get more out of their participation than they ever anticipated. This past year we interviewed several members to find out what the Collaborative offers them and their organizations – here are highlights of what we learned.
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At A Glance

The Collaborative Web site (www.wchq.org) is an essential tool for sharing the results of our performance measurement and improvement activities. We thought it might be interesting to share some of our Web site utilization statistics with you.

13,500 visits to the WCHQ website have occurred between January and August of this year.

Visitors are most interested in the measures we report – over 65% visit the ‘View Our Reports’ tab.

WCHQ-developed measures are the most frequently viewed vs. other measures (e.g. CMS, HEDIS and Leapfrog).

Time to Third-Next-Available Appointment is the most viewed measure followed by: Breast Cancer Screening, Diabetes-Blood Sugar (A1c) Testing, Diabetes-Blood Sugar (A1c) Control, and Colorectal Cancer Screening.

New project to develop
diabetes value metric

logo The Collaborative introduced its new project to develop, test and produce a value metric for the management of diabetes at the WCHQ Assembly held on July 14. The project is supported by a special Aligning Forces for Quality grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The metric will combine patient care outcomes with resource utilization and will be used to identify opportunities for improvement.

WCHQ approved as registry for 2009 Physician Quality Reporting Initiative

cmslogo The Collaborative has again been selected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as an approved registry for the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) program. WCHQ was previously selected as a qualified registry for the 2008 PQRI program. In 2008, we reported quality outcomes for 1,903 physicians – making our PQRI registry the second largest in the country. The Collaborative expects even more physicians will participate in 2009.