National meeting to highlight Colorado Beacon's success

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo., May 15, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The success of the Colorado Beacon Consortium (CBC) represents one leg of an ongoing journey--a journey that began before the three-year Beacon project and will continue well into the future. CBC Director Patrick Gordon will deliver this message to a national audience during a May 22, 2013 meeting, "The Beacon Community Experience: Illuminating the Path Forward--Lessons from the field."

At this event, sponsored by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), Gordon will share lessons learned; specifically, he will talk about how local leadership within the community leveraged technology infrastructure to move toward better value in health care.  

Joining Gordon on the stage will be the following thought leaders:

• Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM, National Coordinator for Health IT.
• Carol Beasley, MPPM, vice president, business development, Institute for Healthcare Improvement
• Asaf Bitton, MD, MPH, FACP, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care
• Susan Dentzer, senior policy advisor at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and health policy analyst, PBS NewsHour
• Mark McClellan, MD, Ph.D., director, Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform; senior fellow, Brookings Institution

Gordon will provide the "boots-on-the-ground" perspective, describing how Western Colorado is moving toward establishment of an accountable community in which health care providers adopt advanced practice-based tools and develop new skills that allow them to account for the health of the community as a whole and fundamentally change the ways they practice medicine.

Addressing past, present and future experience in Colorado, Gordon will explain how the Beacon work has helped build a bridge to population health accountability, payment reform and patient activation--within a single strategy.

"Resources developed during the Beacon demonstration--including the health information infrastructure, workforce development for practice transformation, data collection and measurement--provide ongoing support as care teams work to redesign physician practices. Beacon helped us build a more effective framework for whole-person care," he explained.

CBC's practice transformation resources support the deployment of tools and the development of skills required to deliver comprehensive primary care. This, in turn, creates a viable foundation for value-based payment and accountability for the total cost of care. CBC's approach has emphasized person-centered care, patient self-management and integration of behavioral health.

CBC's 2012 annual report and accompanying video describe how CBC fosters better health by meaningfully using health IT to transform care delivery.

CBC has earned national recognition for its efforts on several fronts. It received a Healthcare Informatics Innovator Award, and a profile appeared in the February 2013 Healthcare Informatics. In addition, The Commonwealth Fund recently released a case study describing how CBC managed to build the capacity needed to exchange health data and transform clinical care, and how CBC uses health IT for quality improvement.

The ONC meeting will be videocast; the link is available here. For more information about this videocast or the Beacon Community Program, please contact the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT at http://www.healthit.gov/newsroom/contact-us.

About the Colorado Beacon Consortium
The Colorado Beacon Consortium is made up of executive-level representation from four mission-driven, not-for-profit, Western Colorado-based organizations, all of which have nationally acknowledged track records of coordination to achieve superior outcomes. They are Mesa County Independent Physicians' Practice Association, Quality Health Network, Rocky Mountain Health Plans and St. Mary's Regional Medical Center. The Colorado Beacon Consortium's mission is to optimize the efficiency, quality and performance of our health care system, and integrate the delivery of care and use of clinical information to improve community health. The geographic focus of the Consortium's activities includes the Colorado counties of Mesa, Delta, Montrose, Garfield, Gunnison, Pitkin and Rio Blanco. To learn more, visit www.coloradobeaconconsortium.org.

SOURCE Colorado Beacon Consortium