Changes and Opportunities

Beacon

November, 8th 2024

All of us have had the experience of unexpected change; it is part of the very nature of being human. We all know change brings challenges, but the opportunities that it presents are very often our second or even third thoughts. Humans like repetition, it’s how we learn. We like calm, it’s how we recharge. We like the known because we can can plan for it. But change is inevitable.

I have been thinking a lot about personal changes in my life and they are common changes that we all experience – aging, health, education, love, and loss. Change can either break relationships or strengthen them. It can either tear apart communities or bond them together. It can help us understand our history, see ourselves in others, find strengths we didn’t know we had, it can open new doors, and help us take the first step through the ones that we have hesitated to go through. For me personally, recent changes have strengthened my relationships and my community. I have gone through big and unwanted changes before with illness and the death of loved ones, and through wanted changes like jobs and a child learning to thrive on their own. Regardless of whether they were wanted or not, those changes have never failed to reveal strengths I didn’t know I had and I wholeheartedly believe that is true for all of us individually and collectively.

Change is part of the reason I chose to become an epidemiologist and to focus on infectious diseases. The idea that we can harness the power of information to measure change and respond effective to it is a powerful one and there is no better poster-child for something that thrives in change than a virus or a bacteria. There is nothing that I can think of which illustrates better our interconnections and our dependence on each other in the face of change than infectious diseases. Our connection is their very raison d’etre but it is also what gives us the power to mitigate them.

As I contemplate the challenges that lay ahead for humanity, the idea meeting change head-on looms large and I am asking myself “what are the first great opportunities that these change brings with them”? Here’s what I have identified in terms of our health care in Washington State:

• We have the opportunity to leverage technology and build systems where information about the health threats we face doesn’t come too late.
• We have the opportunity to learn from both recent and ancient history about how to mitigate the impacts of infectious disease in an effective, equitable, and just way.
• We have the opportunity to use change to bridge the gaps and divides in the Washington State healthcare ecosystem in our quest to improve health for all people who live and work here.

How do we actualize those opportunities and leverage our collective knowledge to use them to create the change we want? Here’s our strategy for the Bree’s evaluation program:

1. Bree Collaborative reporting initiative – Starting in January 2025, the Bree will be working on a simple reporting initiative to help us better understand what organizations have implemented or partially implemented our guidelines. The result of this reporting initiative will be a simple map hosted on the Bree website. Organizations and patients will be able to use this map to find partners in care, understand where gaps still exist, and to understand what has been most important
2. Outpatient Infection Control Report Data Collection – In 2024, the Bree evaluation work focused on collecting baseline data for Perinatal Behavioral Health. In 2025 our focus for data collection will be on the implementation of the Bree’s Outpatient Infection Control Guidelines report. This report was released 2022 in response to gaps we saw during COVID – the great change-maker of this century so far. The Washington State Department of Health is releasing a new Playbook for New Infection Preventionists in Outpatient Settings that will help translate our guidelines into practical implementation and monitoring tools for new IP’s and IP’s who are new to outpatient settings.
3. Outreach to our public and private payers – The strength of the Bree Collaborative lies in it’s ability to bring payers and purchaser to the table to help incentivize best practices. In 2023 and 2024, the Bree focused it’s evaluation primarily on clinicians and health systems so that we could better understand concordance of care with many of our guidelines. In 2025, we would like to learn more about how payers have used the Bree recommendations to become better partners with providers.

More importantly, in the coming year, I am asking our partners in care across Washington State to help strength our relationships and our community; to help us illustrate and illuminate the changes they have made to provide quality, equitable care to Washingtonians regardless of geography, age, gender, background, or culture, by participating in our evaluation work. And finally, as we approach the last month of the year, I have decided to make one other small change. I have decided to change the name of this blog to Beacon. It seems more fitting.

Karie Nicholas, M.A., G. Dip., Evaluation and Measurement Manager