Health care learning collaboratives hold the potential to spread and crowdsource creative solutions to problems commonly faced by hospital administrators and staff. An entire region and beyond can benefit from hearing how one nurse or a medical team created a systems-wide change to improve patient care; and they can work together to develop new strategies as well.
Spanning more than a decade, we nurtured this potential by supporting local and national efforts to develop and leverage learning collaboratives to improve the experience and outcomes of patient care. From 2005 to 2010, the Bay Area Patient Safety Collaborative (renamed BEACON), became the San Francisco Bay Area’s first large-scale hospital learning collaborative. BEACON initially supported local hospitals to implement the 100,000 Lives Campaign, a national Institute for Healthcare Improvement initiative to support hospitals in implementing six interventions. Nearly 75 percent of Bay Area target hospitals participated, resulting in more than 500 lives saved. This success paved the road to BEACON’s ongoing success and growth to include 100 percent of Bay Area hospitals. Through BEACON, independent and system hospitals learned best practices from each other, shared the progress of their own work and obtained training for their personnel on change management theory and implementation.
Recognizing that the success and learnings of BEACON, and other collaboratives, could benefit a national audience, we set out to stimulate a national dialogue on learning collaboratives and to provide a lasting resource to advance the field through the first national conference on learning collaboratives. Held in November 2015, the national conference brought together 30 national experts for two days of interactive learning on how to organize, run and plan for large-scale hospital collaboratives. The conference and its participants touched on all aspects of collaboratives: from staff recruitment and motivation to using technology to advance learning. Additionally, the conference served as a platform to launch a new book on learning collaboratives: All In: Using Healthcare Collaboratives to Save Lives and Improve Care.
More than 35 healthcare professionals including Donald Berwick, M.D., MPP, President Emeritus and Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement and Dennis Wagner, MPA, Director of the Quality Improvement and Innovation Group for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, joined forces to write All In: Using Healthcare Collaboratives to Save Lives and Improve Care. The book covers the origin of the health care collaborative before delving into many successful collaborative efforts with various goals and in diverse settings. The authors share their best practices, what they learned and how they overcame challenges. Now available the book can be purchased on Amazon here. To hear from two of the authors, Sarah Stout and Bruce Spurlock, tune into the free All In live webinar on March 2, 2016.
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