8:30 AM – 9:20 AM

| Wednesday November 7 |

The D2B Quality Alliance: A Medical Society-Led National Quality Improvement Initiative

Matthew Fitzgerald, DrPH
Senior Director, Science and Quality
American College of Cardiology

Objectives

  1. Present D2B Alliance overview
  2. Relay six evidence-based improvement strategies
  3. Provide an overview of project progress

D2B: An Alliance for QualityTM is a new Guidelines Applied in Practice (GAP) program launched by the American College of Cardiology (ACC) to save time and save lives by reducing the door-to-balloon times in U.S. hospitals performing primary PCI. National guidelines developed by the ACC and the American Heart Association (AHA) state that hospitals treating STEMI patients with emergency PCI should reliably achieve a door-to-balloon time of 90 minutes or less. However, accomplishing this level of performance is an organizational challenge. The D2B AllianceTM was developed to make what is current extraordinary performance ordinary by providing hospitals with key evidence-based strategies and supporting tools needed to begin reducing their D2BTM times. This presentation will provide an overview and share improvement strategies.

Behavioral Health: Trends and Solutions

John Robinson, MD, PhD, Consultant
John W. Robinson, M.D., Ph.D., LLC

Objectives

  1. Increase awareness of how health care trends are affecting behavioral care management
  2. Promote greater understanding of the demands placed on behavioral care guidelines by trends in managed care
  3. Increase awareness of the relative merits of diagnosis-based versus symptom-based guidelines

In recent years, managed care organizations (MCOs) have been placing greater emphasis on collaboration with providers, promotion of evidence-based practice, and the long term management of chronic conditions. Managed behavioral healthcare has fallen behind in this transition, partly due to a misconception that evidence-based medicine has limited relevance to the treatment of behavioral health conditions. However, payors and MCOs are becoming increasingly aware that failure to appropriately treat common, often chronic, behavioral health conditions leads not only to unnecessary psychiatric morbidity, but also to increased medical costs and lowered occupational and social productivity. In response, MCOs are paying greater attention to behavioral healthcare management, and in doing so, will likely be interested in applying some of the same strategies to behavioral healthcare management that are being used to transform medical care management, such as promoting evidence-based practice and assuring that chronic conditions are properly managed over the long term. However, the application of such strategies requires access to care guidelines that are diagnosis-based, firmly rooted in the best scientific evidence, and more sophisticated than have typically been used in managed behavioral healthcare.

If You Never Ate Häagen Dazs®, Would You Know What You Were Missing?

Nancy Skinner, RN, CCM, Director, Board of Directors
Case Management Society of America

(Repeat Session)

Objectives

  1. Identify issues and barriers to transitions across the continuum of care
  2. Discuss available technologies, evidence based guidelines, medication reconciliation strategies and adherence gaps that impact the patient's movement through the healthcare continuum
  3. Understand tools, guidelines and pathways that facilitate effective communication between patients

Healthcare today is sometimes fragmented and is not consistently associated with an efficient transition of patient care. Patients can be challenged by an inability to comprehensively understand their diagnosis, implement all aspects of the continuing care plan, or even realize which provider will guide their care as they transition through the healthcare continuum.

This presentation will discuss the future of transition and coordination of care, and demonstrate how a partnership between case/care managers and patients can contribute to advancing desired healthcare outcomes. Provided information will be based on tools developed by the National Transitions of Care Coalition (NTOCC). NTOCC has brought together more than 30 associations and organizations representing stakeholders from various practice settings to address improving care coordination and communication as patients leave one healthcare setting and move to another. NTOCC seeks to be an influential stakeholder in public awareness, education, and health policy so that our health care system will focus efforts on improving the coordination of care among the various health care settings impacting quality of care, reduction of medication errors and enhancing clinical outcomes.