Alliance Blog

Since 2008, the Alliance has released an annual report highlighting health care quality and value at medical groups and hospitals in Washington state. Each year, the report demonstrates that the quality of care varies and that everyone has room to improve. At the Alliance, we also seek to continuously improve, and therefore try to adapt ...

The last few weeks have been exceptionally active for the Alliance. In February, we released our third report on the quality of patient experience in our state. Patient experience is an important component of health care value, which has become a top priority of both health care leaders and consumers. The survey, sent to 181,000 ...

This month, we’re excited to welcome both Express Scripts and CareATC as the newest members of the Alliance. Express Scripts Express Scripts works to make the use of prescription drugs safer and more affordable, managing more than one billion prescriptions each year for tens of millions of patients. Their clients include employers, health plans, unions ...

This blog post was re-printed with permission of the Institute of Translational Health Sciences. If you work in primary care, you’ve probably heard of Choosing Wisely. Established in 2012 by the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Foundation, Choosing Wisely is a national initiative to reduce “low-value care” that includes the overuse of tests and ...

Until recently, health care purchasing is the one area in which usual business practices, such as supply chain management, are not employed to manage cost and quality. Purchasers have often felt powerless to negotiate for better value or felt they have little choice but to accept what health care providers and health insurance plans offer. ...

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced a new agreement to standardize measures of health care quality. We applaud this announcement. The more organizations that can align around a common set of quality measures, the clearer the market signal will be regarding purchaser and payer expectations for performance on key indicators. The ...

I am pleased to announce that the Alliance will continue to contract with the Washington State Health Care Authority in 2016 for work related to the CMS/CMMI State Innovation Model grant. Under this contract, the Alliance will project manage all of the work related to implementation of the Washington State Common Measure Set on Health ...

This month, we’re excited to welcome Washington State University (WSU) Spokane as the newest purchaser member of the Alliance. Not only does WSU joining the Alliance help us extend our statewide reach and influence in eastern Washington, but they are also a nationally recognized research institution, bringing their expertise in health care to the Alliance. ...

Cervical cancer is one of the cancers that can be treated most successfully — if it’s detected early. And early detection is made possible through Pap test screening, which detects cervical cell changes and early cervical cancers before they cause symptoms. But before detection, there is prevention. And cervical cancer can also be prevented through ...

Last month, the Alliance, in partnership with the Washington State Health Care Authority (HCA), unveiled the first set of results for the Washington State Common Measure Set for Health Care Quality and Cost, a set of 52 measures that enable a common way of tracking important elements of health and how well the health care system ...

Value in health care means high quality and a good patient experience at a fair price. Purchasers have a big role to play in helping their employees and members get high-value care through smart benefit design and employee communication and engagement. As a group, employers and health trusts have enormous power to shape the health care ...

The first step in reducing variation is to measure it, so we know where to target our efforts. In a well-functioning health care delivery system, everyone would be receiving a similar level of high-quality, evidence-based health care for the same condition or service. But findings in the latest Community Checkup report show variation remains a persistent ...