August 18, 2017
Building Health Equity
“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, 1966 I believe that everyone deserves their best chance at being healthy. Unfortunately, our country still has a long way to go. How healthy we are and whether we can get the type of health…
Read more »August 1, 2017
Emerging Research on the Impacts of Diet on Dementia
Since January 2017, the Bree Collaborative’s Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias workgroup has been compiling recommendations to align care delivery for patients, as well as families and caregivers, with best practices using existing evidence-based standard of care for diagnosis, treatment, supportive care, transitions of care, delirium, and advance care planning. One of the most common…
Read more »July 4, 2017
A Summer Reading List
This month I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Keith Wailoo, Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, when he spoke at the University of Washington Medical Center, Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine’s annual lecture. Dr. Wailoo spoke about his book, Pain: A Political History, giving a historical perspective of our nation’s…
Read more »June 15, 2017
Selecting New Topics for 2018
Every year our members select new topics. This is an exciting time for our Collaborative – a chance to look back at our previous work and to think about how we can continue to help improve health care quality, outcomes, and affordability in our community. We will start our conversation on new topics at our…
Read more »June 1, 2017
Working Together to Impact the Opioid Epidemic
Right now our workgroups are looking at both opioid prescribing and opioid use disorder treatment – focusing on prevention and on building our health system treatment infrastructure. We welcome you to join either of these conversations – and especially to give us feedback on our metrics to track opioid prescribing that are currently out for…
Read more »May 8, 2017
Introducing the Implementation Roadmap and Survey Results
The Bree Collaborative has worked to survey the impact of our recommendations in hospitals, medical groups, and health plans since May 2016. From reducing inappropriate caesarian sections to improving end-of-life care, our survey shows where our recommendations or other similar quality improvements have been implemented. From this information we created an Implementation Roadmap outlining next…
Read more »May 1, 2017
Health Care Authority Requests Information on Bundled Episodes of Care
The Bree Collaborative develops bundled payments or episodes of care in our Accountable Payment Models workgroup – we are currently re-reviewing our Total Knee and Total Hip Replacement Bundle and Warranty and invite you to be a part of this conversation here. The Health Care Authority is also working to transform our health care system. In…
Read more »April 1, 2017
Introducing Our Recommendations to Integrate Behavioral Health into Primary Care
After twelve months of tireless work from our volunteers on the Behavioral Health Integration workgroup – I am more than pleased to tell you that our Report and Recommendations has been adopted by our Bree Collaborative members and sent on to the Health Care Authority! We could not have done this without our workgroup members…
Read more »February 28, 2017
What Is Public Health and Why Is It Essential
At the Bree Collaborative we talk a lot about health care procedures that we don’t need – that don’t make us any healthier and may in fact hurt us. A recent Atlantic article on the epidemic of unnecessary treatment, When Evidence Says No, but Doctors Say Yes, is an excellent study of overused treatments and…
Read more »February 23, 2017
Learning Together: Upcoming Conferences on Paying for Value in Cancer Care and Patient Safety
The Bree Collaborative is lucky to live within a diverse and vibrant health care community. Today, we are highlighting, and looking forward to attending, two spring conferences – the Hutchinson Institute for Cancer Outcomes Research’s (HICOR) Paying for Value: 2017 Value in Cancer Care Summit on Friday, April 7th and the Washington Patient Safety Coalition’s…
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