Payment Reform Learning Collaborative: An Interactive Series to Promote Shared Decision Making as a Key Tool

Grant Application

Deborah Moss, MD, MPH, UPMC HealthPlan, and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC

Proposed Innovation

A key focus of U.S. health care payment reform (PR) is to promote greater value by better addressing consumer needs. Its success depends on effectively engaging multiple stakeholders around a shared vision.

This project built on an educational series initiated in 2013 as part of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded “UPMC for You” project that introduced a value-based payment model to change the way care is delivered for medically fragile children. In this Payment Reform Learning Collaborative, child health stakeholders worked together to demonstrate how shared decision making (SDM) can be improved on and used more effectively to address health literacy and integration of physical and mental health care.

Improvements

This year-long Learning Collaborative engaged a broad range of stakeholders — including family members who have children with special health care needs — in a series of sessions aimed at designing and implementing tools and processes for shared decision making and promoting techniques to enhance patient self-management. Session topics included “Attending to Health Literacy Across the Health System as a Key Tool in SDM” and “Integration of Physical and Behavioral Health: A Population Approach Using Shared Decision Making.”

Outcomes

Quantitative and qualitative measures were used to evaluate the impact of the Learning Collaborative. By bringing together disparate perspectives of key stakeholders to prepare for a changing health care environment, the Learning Collaborative created opportunities to develop and disseminate innovative solutions to complex problems.

Overall, participants reported that the session topics were very important and greatly increased their knowledge of issues, such as health literacy and population health. Participants also said the sessions gave them the confidence to put new knowledge into practice and increased networking among diverse health system stakeholders.