Extending more than a decade of shared learning through organized collaboratives, Moore Foundation grantee, Cynosure Health, recently gathered 30 experts to discuss how to organize, run and plan for large-scale hospital collaboratives. This first national conference on health care learning collaboratives took place in Baltimore, Maryland and featured two days of interactive learning, instructional deep dive sessions and a host of expert speakers, including keynote Donald Berwick, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The conference also set the stage for the launch and free distribution of a new book, "All in: Using Health Care Collaboratives to Save Lives and Improve Care."
Attended by close to 150 representatives from health systems, quality improvement organizations, foundations, regulators, and researchers, the conference provided opportunities for attendees to learn from others, improve the design and implementation of their own collaboratives, and shape the future design and focus of learning collaboratives. Breakout sessions touched on staff recruitment and motivation; effective design elements; budgeting, funding and data; how to turn knowledge into action; using technology to advance learning; leadership and governance; and the future of learning collaboratives.
A few key take-aways include:
- Quality improvement is a social and a medical intervention.
- Collaborative change is messy and occurs in a changing environment. Flexibility and the ability to adapt collaboratives over time is key.
- Collaboratives build change capacity in addition to improving the topic at hand. They offer a tremendous opportunity to build the change skills of the broader healthcare team.
The Baltimore conference represents the culmination of more than a decade of the Moore Foundation’s support of collaboratives. From 2005 to 2010, Cynosure successfully ran the Bay Area Patient Safety Collaborative (renamed BEACON), the San Francisco Bay Area’s first hospital improvement collaborative in which all local hospitals participated. This year’s conference and the book aims to foster the ongoing stewardship of health care learning collaboratives.
All in: Using Health Care Collaboratives to Save Lives and Improve Care will be available for purchase at the IHI National Forum and through Amazon.com in December 2015. You can read the opening, table of contents and a free downloadable chapter by the co-founder and principal of The Billions Institute, Joe McCannon here.
Conference presentations and additional resources are available here.
Learn more about Cynosure here.
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