Beacon Community of Practice Engagement

1. Beacon Community of Practice Engagement Beacon Community of Practice Initiatives Beacon Community of Practice What are Communities of Practice? Abstract Increasing Level of Engagement Beacon’s Importance to Patients • Background: • The Southeast Minnesota Beacon Community consists of eleven counties, their public health departments, many health care providers, and school districts. Principal collaborating institutions and recipients of the $12.3 million Beacon grant include Austin Medical Center; Mayo Health System; Mayo Clinic; Olmsted County Public Health; Olmsted Medical Center; and Winona Health Services. • Childhood Asthma and Adult Type II Diabetes are both highly prevalent conditions in southeastern Minnesota that are on the rise and are associated with increased health care costs, restricted lives, downstream illnesses and complications, and loss of time at work or school. • Objectives: • To leverage open source tools in developing health information exchange strategies for healthcare institutions. • To develop an affordable and replicable model of health information exchange for mid level entities (i.e. local public health) and small sized entities (i.e. schools, long term care, home health agencies) • To lay the groundwork for improving chronic disease population outcomes. • To enhance PH-Doc to become an affordable and sustainable system that other local public health agencies can adopt. • To align Beacon asthma and diabetes interventions with SE MN agencies strategic direction. • Methods: • Utilizing a Community of Practice (CP) Model we have brought together agencies from across southeastern MN to work together in coordinating and modifying business practices to better utilize exchanged data in both decision making and supporting consistency. The Beacon CP was built from a foundation of existing partnerships including Southeast Local Public Health Association (LPHA) and Southeast Minnesota Immunization Connection (SEMIC). We quickly determined it was critical to include exchange partners based upon providers serving the target populations. Two challenges resulted: • Working within the differences of partner technical capacity, we categorized three levels of capacity and developed strategies for each level. • We needed to address levels of engagement, regardless of technical capacity. This model was loosely based upon the PH-Doc “depth of involvement” grid where increased engagement is accomplished through increased participation. • Throughout this project we have always maintained the asthma and diabetes initiatives along with patient centered goals at the forefront of intervention and system design. Communities of Practice are groups of people who share concerns or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.1 • 3 Characteristics • The Domain: Shared area of interest. • The Community: Members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other. • The Practice: Members develop a shared collection of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems — in short, a shared practice. SE MN Communities of Practice Beacon Communities of Practice 3 Levels of Exchange Partners References • Communities of Practice http:/www.ewenger.com/theory/. Daniel Jensen, MPH, Marty Alemán, MAN, PHN, Shaylene Baumbach • The Beacon Initiative advocates for improved patient outcomes by: • Laying the groundwork for better use of health information to improve health. • Demonstrate secure, confidential health information exchange between parties authorized by the patient. • Reduce inappropriate healthcare utilization and cost . • 4. Improve the ability of individuals to follow through on disease treatment plans. “This is not a technology problem; this is a collaborative opportunity.” • SE MN Examples: • SE Local Public Health Association • (LPHA) • SE MN Immunization Connection • (SEMIC) • SE MN Beacon • Diabetes: • The Diabetes project focus is to know at any time: • What is the quality of life and functional status (along with disease control metrics) of patients (described by their demographic and health literacy characteristics) in Southeast Minnesota. • To implement tailored patient decision aids to enhance patient involvement in clinical decisions about primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular events. • Asthma: • The Asthma project will enable the asthma management program with technologies for improved access, efficiencies, confidential student tracking and direct communication lines with health professionals. Our focus is on good communication among health professionals, school staff, and families through ongoing exchange of information, agreement on goals and strategies, and a sharing of responsibilities.  2011 Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research