• Pursuing Perfect Care: Improving Chronic Care Outcomes by Treating the Whole Patient, 8/22/07
• Ensuring the Benefits of Public Reporting and Pay-for-Performance Programs Outweigh the Unintended Consequences, 9/6/2007

During Pursuing Perfect Care: Improving Chronic Care Outcomes by Treating the Whole Patient, you'll hear from organizations who are implementing perfect care processes in heart failure and medication management with details on how they've implemented their programs and the results they are achieving.

Donna Isgett, vice president for clinical effectiveness at McLeod Health, will describe the perfect care processes at McLeod while Leanne Huminski, chief nursing officer, McLeod Medical Center, will provide the inside details on the medication management program, which has a goal of eliminating adverse drug events. You'll also hear from Lenore Blank and Michele Gilbert, members of the heart failure team at Hackensack University Medical Center (HUMC), on their team's perfect care processes that provide care across the continuum for heart failure patients from their acceptance into the program to their return home. They'll discuss their identification and stratification strategies, how they mentor and educate nurses serving these patients, the indicators and tools they use and how they've streamlined the discharge process and improved medication reconciliation.

HUMC and McLeod Health are two of only thirteen healthcare organizations worldwide selected for the Pursuing Perfection: Raising the Bar for Health Care Performance. Pursuing Perfection is sponsored by the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the IHI, an internationally recognized leader in healthcare quality.

During Ensuring the Benefits of Public Reporting and Pay-for-Performance Programs Outweigh the Unintended Consequences, a 45-minute audio conference roundtable on September 6, 2007, will examine some of the unintended consequences from pay-for-performance programs and how healthcare organizations can circumvent these problems. Industry expert Dr. Dale Bratzler, QIOSC medical director, Oklahoma Foundation for Medical Quality Inc., will provide a brief overview of the potential unintended consequences of public reporting that could lead to patient harm in both direct and indirect ways.

Dr. Bratzler will also describe how avoiding these unintended consequences of performance measurement requires careful attention to the development of measure specifications and setting realistic goals for improvement. Conference participants will then have the opportunity to probe for more details and bring to the "table" the areas of concern in their organization.

Your registration fee covers one telephone line from your site. Include as many individuals from your organization as you wish - there is no additional charge. Gather in a conference room and use a speakerphone.