Community Partnership

Another support mechanism that drives quality improvement is collaboration. Health care markets are composed of multiple health care organizations including health plans, hospitals, and clinics. These organizations typically rely on overlapping groups of physicians to provide care to patients. The connection between the health plans, physicians, and patients in any given community offers strong support for understanding community-wide collaboration, particularly around long-term, chronic health conditions such as diabetes. By coming together and collaborating at the community level, it is possible for health plans to promote economies of scale and to ensure the provision of consistent health care messages to patients and providers.

To support and enhance the activities of the community partnerships, AAHP, now America's Health Insurance Plans, received a grant from the Commonwealth Fund provided substantial on-site management, technical assistance, and evaluation support through the hiring of a Community Partnership Manager in each location and an overall Evaluation Consultant. The Community Partnership Managers helped to define the goals and workplan of the partnership, obtained technical assistance, represented the partnership as necessary within the community, gathered feedback from partners to ensure the partnership met their needs and advanced the partnership’s goals, provided written progress reports, and worked with the partners and Evaluation Consultant to assure that appropriate evaluation data was collected. The Evaluation Consultant, a health services researcher, worked with each partnership to design and implement an appropriate evaluation strategy, including establishing both process and outcome measures. The Consultant worked with the Community Partnership Managers to ensure that the appropriate data was collected.

Taking on Diabetes
601 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
South Building, Suite 500
Washington, DC 20004
(202) 778-3281
takingondiabetes@ahip.org