Alliance Blog

The enduring strength of the Washington Health Alliance is in large part attributed to senior health care and business leaders in Washington who accept leadership roles on the Board of Directors because they care about collaborating around ways to drive quality and cost transparency and to improve health care affordability for all in our state. ...

More than 1,250 people attended the University of Michigan’s Center for Value-Based Insurance Design 2022 Summit last month, where stakeholders from across the country discussed the opportunities and challenges to reducing health care disparities. During the keynote panel, “Strategies to Reduce Health Care Disparities and Enhance Equity,” Dora Hughes, Chief Medical Officer at the CMS ...

by Alliance Medical Director Dr. Sharon Eloranta Do you enjoy “springing forward” when we make the change from Standard Time (ST) to Daylight Savings Time (DST) each year? For many, this change is more than a minor annoyance. So many people dislike it so much that Washington state passed a law signed by Governor Jay ...

by Alliance Medical Director Dr. Sharon Eloranta Unsafe care for patients is startlingly common – estimates indicate that at least 250,000 Americans die each year from incidents related to preventable medical error, and many more are harmed. To help address this issue, many organizations and businesses have come together to advocate for the creation of ...

March 21, 2022 Representative Suzan DelBene 2330 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Via Email Dear Representative DelBene: Thank you for your leadership and your support to increase the adoption of value-based care and alternative payment models across the country. This subject is of great importance to the Washington Health Alliance (Alliance), a multi-stakeholder ...

The Theme for Black History Month is Black Health and Wellness. Unfortunately, there is much to remind us of how far we have to go on both fronts. There is no denying that the impact of discrimination in our health system is significant, as reflected by the disparities in care identified in “Unequal Treatment: Confronting ...

On February 11th, Washington Governor Jay Inslee appointed Washington Medical Director Dr. Sharon Eloranta to serve on the Robert Bree Collaborative, created in 2011 by the Washington State Legislature to enable public and private health care stakeholder to work together to identify specific ways to improve health care quality, outcomes, and affordability in Washington state. ...

The Washington Health Alliance’s new Total Cost of Care report has garnered significant attention, including coverage by the Everett Herald, AboutHealthTransparency.org, Healthcare Innovation, State of Reform, and hundreds of other news organizations across the country that carried the announcement. It has been called, ”exciting,” “courageous,” “amazing,” and “transformative.” The online tool provides unprecedented detail on ...

It is estimated that 80% of Americans will have some form of back pain in their lifetime, but not all of them will receive high quality health care to address it. As early as 1985, studies showed the benefits of motion in the healing process and speculation that “help will come in the next decade ...

The 17th Annual Summit by the University of Michigan Center for Value-Based Insurance Design (V-BID) will be held on March 23rd. A broad range of healthcare stakeholders from across the nation will address the topic, “Enhancing Health Equity,” including: reducing health care disparities; expanding the role of value-based insurance design by public and private payers; ...

The Washington Health Alliance is on schedule to release the 16th Community Checkup report later this month with results for more than 2,300 unique entities, including clinics, medical groups, hospitals, and health plans with medical claims from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020. Included in this release are results for more than 100 measures, ...

A recent article estimates that as many as 400,000 incidents of preventable harm occur in the United States each year, resulting in approximately 100,000 deaths and a cost estimated at $60 billion. Patient Safety Awareness Week, from March 13th to 19th, provides an opportunity to encourage the issue of patient safety to be discussed openly ...