Transforming Health Care Through Quality Improvement.
The Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ) works closely with its members and stakeholders on collaborative projects to ensure better patient outcomes, improve system performance, and make care more affordable. It starts with collecting data and using that information to identify the process or system that can be improved.
With member input, WCHQ organizes its improvement work into topic-specific areas and creates an Improvement Team for each comprised of members and select stakeholders.
To learn more or to join a team, contact info@wchq.org.
The Improvement Teams
Antibiotic Stewardship: Works to address the ongoing public health concerns around antibiotic overuse that leads to antibiotic resistance. The group specifically looks at prescribing practices around sinusitis, upper respiratory infection and bronchitis and brings awareness through data and education to WCHQ clinicians.
Asthma: WCHQ collects data on the ACT asthma control test and has developed a new project aimed at developing novel interventions to drive asthma improvement across the membership.
Behavioral Health: WCHQ is supporting members' efforts to integrate behavioral health into primary care, increase depression screening rates, and related topics. WCHQ is supporting members' efforts to integrate behavioral health into primary care, increase depression screening rates, and related topics.
Chronic Disease Learning Collaborative: This learning collaborative meets with experts to learn and share best practices and interventions that are proven to improve care for patients with chronic disease, particularly diabetes and hypertension. Designing and implementing team-based care for those patients with chronic disease is integral to this work.
Chronic Kidney Disease: The CKD Advisory Group supports efforts to identify CKD earlier and treat it sooner for patients who are diabetic or have hypertension.
Colorectal Cancer Screening: The Colorectal Cancer (CRC) Screening Advisory Group is looking at WCHQ data within member health systems to understand the disparities that exist for CRC screening in rural populations. The advisory group is in line with the National Colorectal Cancer Screening Round Table's goal, 80% of eligible patients screened.
Disparities: WCHQ is leading a statewide initiative to identify and reduce disparities statewide. Health systems, in collaboration with payers and stakeholders committed to eliminating health care disparities, will work in partnership with urban and rural communities to ensure the health needs of all people are met.
Immunizations: The WCHQ Child and Adolescent Immunization Improvement Team's goal is to increase immunization rates for children and adolescents in Wisconsin. This group is working to improve immunization outcomes by understanding and addressing vaccine hesitancy and also addresses disparities among populations experiencing lower vaccination rates.
Lung Cancer Biomarker Testing: This advisory group is working with member health systems to improve the frequency and quality of biomarker testing for non-small cell lung cancer. The advisory group is working to develop a best practice workflow while providing education.
Maternal Health: WCHQ members, community partners and payers work to reduce the gaps in at-risk pregnant women and their families. Populations identified as higher-risk are Black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian, underserved, rural disadvantaged and urban disadvantaged. WCHQ will use data on known causes of maternal mortality to identify areas of improvement and work with health systems on best practices to drive improvement.
Obesity: WCHQ has developed new initiative aimed at improving care for individuals living with obesity. This multi-year project is focused on sharing education, best practices and interventions with providers, employers and insurers. This team has developed several quality measures, with provider input, that support members in their efforts to improve care for this patient population.
Statewide Improvement Priorities for 2023
The WCHQ 2023 improvement priorities are: behavioral health, colorectal cancer screening, chronic disease management, and adolescent and child health. In addition, WCHQ will direct resources to increasing immunization rates as members are concerned about the dramatic decline in the administration of life-saving vaccines. Improvement work related to oral health and health disparities will also be supported. These broad strategies for improvement cross many clinical priorities.
WCHQ’s priorities represent the clinical improvement topics of highest importance to its members and will be supported by WCHQ staff, broadly promoted and regularly monitored.
To learn more or join an improvement team, contact info@wchq.org.
