Improving Chronic Illness Care
Improving Chronic Illness Care

Practice Coaching

"High quality primary care is essential to making American healthcare more responsive to the needs of healthy individuals and those with ongoing health problems."  - Ed Wagner
 
Supported by The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, in 2006 a team from RAND, the MacColl Institute for Health Care Innovation and the California Healthcare Safety Net Institute began developing a way to help safety net practices implement the Chronic Care Model along with complementary changes to business systems designed to assure sustainability. 
 
The strategy involves a toolkit supported by a practice coach to help practices redesign their care systems in a way that is less time- and resource-intensive than participation in traditional healthcare quality improvement collaboratives.   
  
Our goals in this project were to offer a sequenced approach to implementing the CCM while integrating the concepts of efficiency, revenue enhancement and productivity.  This approach is intended to reach small health care practices and provide ready access to tools and concepts outside of a formal quality improvement collaborative. 

For two years, the team worked with two California public health and hospital systems to develop, test, and disseminate the toolkit and a coaching intervention with accompanying manual.   Results from the associated randomized trial are forthcoming.
 
Practice change resources associated with this project include the toolkit “Integrating Chronic Care and Business Strategies in the Safety Net”, a map of tools contained in the toolkit indexed by CCM element, and "A Practice Coaching Manual", an accompanying guide.
 
Project Team
Brian Austin                                                MacColl Institute for Healthcare Innovation
Cindy Brach, M.P.P.                                     Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Katie Coleman, M.S.P.H.                               MacColl Institute for Healthcare Innovation
Dona Cutsogeorge, M.A.                               MacColl Institute for Healthcare Innovation
Mike Hindmarsh, M.A.                                  Hindsight Consulting
Wendy Jameson, M.P.P, M.P.H.                     California Health Care Safety Net Institute
Marjorie Pearson, Ph.D., M.S.H.S.                  RAND
Ed Wagner, M.D., M.P.H.                               MacColl Institute for Healthcare Innovation
Shinyi Wu, Ph.D.                                          RAND (current affiliation at USC)

Partners:     RAND
                  California Health Care Safety Net Institute
 
Funded by:  The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality