Feature
Watch the Video, Earn the Credits
Learn how to improve care transitions and prevent avoidable hospital readmissions, and pick up nursing and medical education con-ed credits.
Read more
The evaluation of Improving Chronic Illness Care tested the effectiveness of the use of learning collaboratives and the Chronic Care Model in improving health care organizations’ ability to improve the health of patients with chronic illness. The evaluation found that:
- The learning collaborative approach and the application of the chronic care model helped organizations to make and sustain practice changes.
- These changes led to better performance on measures of processes proven to improve chronic illness care. Performance on some outcome measures also improved, although most outcomes will take longer than the time of the project to manifest themselves.
- Costs appear to be less than the potential benefit of reduced hospitalizations for chronic illness, but again, the time frame of the evaluation did not allow for a full assessment of the cost impact.
The report describes various program and program elements, continuous quality improvement strategy, purpose and design of the evaluation, methodology, findings, limitations, tools, and lessons learned.