This year our Washington State Patient Safety Coalition will start to map our future with through a strategic planning process to determine our next group of initiatives. This is where we recommit to current initiatives or sunset and introduce new initiatives. Right now we are focused on: Improving the Diagnostic Process through better provider and...

2023 sees the launch of three new Bree Collaborative workgroups. Each workgroup will meet monthly to discuss common barriers and develop best practices to improve access, affordability, outcomes, and equity in Washington state. Meeting dates and a brief description of each workgroup are listed below. Please reach out to Bree staff nlocke@qualityhealth.org if you are interested in participating...

By Ginny Weir, MPH, CEO I am more than proud to announce the publication of Obstetrical Care Outcomes Assessment Program: A White Paper in Three Parts outlining how OB COAP partners around clinical data to improve birth outcomes. Our series is directed to everyone involved in the birth of babies and funded by a generous...

My back has been hurting over the last month or so. I know that personal health is one of the seven topics we are not supposed to talk about and also that acute low back pain has impacted about one in four of us in the last three months and will impact MOST of us...

By Ginny Weir, MPH, CEO We have usually paid for health care in ways that encourage more services — whether they improved health or not – a fee for each service. Ten years ago, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation started testing payment and service delivery models beyond fee for service. The goal was...

Aside from blackberry season and my birthday, August is my time of self-care, a time to step back and try not to bake in the sun like lawns across the pacific northwest. In How I self-care New York times staff list some of what they do to step back and care for themselves. At the...

My wife and I used to sit at Greenlake and rate dogs walking by on a 0-10 scale. This rating was purely based on aesthetics although we did consider context in that dogs were rated more favorably if they looked more like their humans. We called this dogging but neither of us had grown up...

In her brilliant book, The Sum of Us: How Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, Heather McGhee writes, “A functioning society rests on a web of mutuality, a willingness among all involved to share enough with one another to accomplish what no one person can do alone.” She of course is talking...

Building a more equitable health care ecosystem is what keeps me engaged in our improvement world. Our primary organizational strategy at FHCQ is “applying an equity lens to build shared accountability for progress.” Equity as a concept feels omnipresent - I hate the idea of equity as jargon or worse – a commodity. I find...

I have been thinking often about communication as we move into spring – how two people or two organizations can seem to be speaking a different language event when using the same words. About how – in these uncertain spaces – coming to a shared understanding is more important than ever. I think about difficulties...