Are you a health care provider seeking to improve the quality of care that you provide to patients with chronic, eventually fatal illness? We're in the business of helping you succeed!
Our Initiative to Improve Quality at the End of Life is a partnership of two private not-for-profit organizations - The Washington Home Center for Palliative Care Studies and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement - to help provider organizations continuously improve the quality and value of end of life care. Americans are now likely to be disabled for many months or years by serious, eventually fatal diseases such as heart and lung failure, dementia, stroke, and cancer. In implementing quality improvement activities at the national and regional levels, the Initiative aims to be a public force for much-needed change in the health care system and society related to the care of the chronically ill and dying.
The Washington Home Center for Palliative Care Studies (CPCS) is a scholarly team based in Washington, DC that does research and supports quality improvement in order to provide the information necessary to shape policy and practice worthy to serve those with eventually fatal illness. It was founded in the belief that life under the shadow of death can be rewarding, comfortable, and meaningful for almost all persons -- but achieving that goal requires real change in the care system.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) is a Boston-based, independent, non-profit organization working since 1991 to accelerate improvement in health care systems in the United States, Canada, and Europe by fostering collaboration, rather than competition, among health care organizations. IHI provides bridges connecting people and organizations that are committed to real health care reform and who believe they can accomplish more by working together than they can separately.
The RAND/IHI Initiative to Improve Quality at the End of Life will provide a set of sustainable services that helps provider organizations develop excellence in end of life care for a few defined populations and demonstrably better care in thousands of provider programs within five years.
We maintain a search and referral engine that can put you in touch with many excellent resources in the areas of quality improvement and end of life care. Use this referral engine to let us know what you what you are struggling with in your own organization, or what you are progressing with and would like to communicate to others.
Be sure to visit our online conference, an internet-based quality improvement information clearinghouse and virtual bulletin board, hosted by the Inter-Institutional Collaborating Network On End-of-Life Care (IICN). To take a tour of the site, click on the "Guest" button near the bottom of the screen. This will take you to a page that has a list of "Conferences" along the left-hand side, including the "Quality Improvement Collaboration" conference.
We recently published the authoritative textbook on how to make quality improvement happen within health care organizations. You can search excerpts from Improving Care for the End of Life ("The Sourcebook")!
Excerpts are also available for our well received book for the public, Handbook for Mortals. The paperback edition, published by Oxford University Press, will be in bookstores this coming fall.
| This content is provided by The Washington Home Center for Palliative Care Studies (CPCS) with the support of RAND Health. Visit www.medicaring.org to find help with quality improvement projects in end-of-life care. |