Looking to 2017

On Wednesday, Bree Collaborative members voted on our work for 2017. Along with re-reviewing our Total Knee and Total Hip Replacement Bundle and Warranty our members elected to create workgroups and develop evidence-based recommendations for:

– Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias
– Hysterectomy
– Opioid Use Disorder Treatment

Thank you to the many community members who spoke about these and other topics. We are lucky to live in a State with such an engaged health care community.  We also discussed the issue of prior authorization and how difficult this can be for clinicians, hospitals, health plans, and others. While this was not selected as one of our three topics for 2017, we hope to continue to have discussions about how we can help improve this process. You can find all our materials from Wednesday’s meeting here.  We also discussed the articles Effectiveness of Clinical Decision Support in Controlling Inappropriate Imaging and EHR use consuming physicians’ time for patients.

Traditionally, as we look forward to new topics, we also look back at previous work to review, celebrate successes, and identify areas for improvement. We had a chance to do this at our July meeting where we shared responses to the 2016 Bree Community and Member Surveys. The surveys asked both the public and our members about their understanding of our purpose, our effectiveness, goals for the next three years, and what could be changed.

The July meeting then broke into small groups to discuss questions about how well we have met the goals we discussed in 2013. In 2013 members wanted effective and measurable results, broader public engagement, and most importantly implementation. You can see results of this 2013 survey here.

Implementation and hardwiring our recommendations into practice was a big part of what we heard from the community too – especially around measuring results.  Our members discussed the need to simplify our recommendations to make sure we can achieve our goals and making sure that we are reflecting the health care community in Washington State. Right now we are working to do a pulse check on how the Washington State health care system is aligned with or adopting our Bree recommendations (see Surveying Our Community). We know what some of our recommendations reflect the great work that many providers, hospitals, and plans were already doing and we want to celebrate that! We also want to know where we can help better educate the community about our work so that new, patients undergoing a knee replacement, people with low back pain, and others receive high quality, affordable care everywhere in the State!

We celebrated the Health Care Authority’s work to implement our recommendations through contracting (see From Concept to Contracting: How One Purchaser Uses Bree Best Practice Recommendations to Achieve the Triple Aim) and Washington State’s great work on healthier moms and babies through patient-centered obstetrics care and working to align end-of-life care with patients’ goals of care.

Our process within the group is strong and we are increasing our presence in the community and awareness about our work. We will continue to create meaningful dialogue around important issues.

Are you interested in our three (or four) new topics? Do you have other feedback about our work? Email me at GWeir@qualityhealth.org

Ginny Weir, MPH
Program Director, Bree Collaborative

Emily Wittenhagen
Program Assistant, Bree Collaborative