In 2016, academic medical centers joined together to form the High Value Practice Academic Alliance (HVPAA, www.hvpaa.org), a multi-institutional multispecialty organization designed to efficiently and effectively advance value-based quality improvement initiatives on a national scale by opening channels of communication. Nearly 200 faculty leaders from > 80 academic centers in the US and Canada serve as institutional or departmental representatives (www.hvpaa.org/faculty/). Members convene on monthly conference calls for information sharing and educational presentations, organize an annual research and education conference, collaborate on multicenter practice improvement initiatives and publications and direct a high value care future leader professional development program for residents and fellows. This proposal is requesting support for the 2nd annual HVPAA Research and Education Conference. An important outcome of the 2017 inaugural HVPAA conference was that the collective performance improvement work contributed to a blueprint that encompasses all of the areas health systems must address to become truly high value care centers. To effectively refine medicine, QI efforts must be implemented across the following 5 pillars (1) Diagnostic and therapeutic efficiency, (2) quality-driven care pathways, (3) transitions, (4) Optimizing patient care setting and (5) Preventative medicine Discharge The HVPAA annual conference serves as a venue to generate publication of individual quality improvements initiatives and foster collaboration on multicenter performance improvement guides and research investigations. The editor of the Annals of Internal Medicine invited all of the 2017 abstract presenters to submit their work to be reviewed for potential publication, as high value care is a priority topic for the journal. JAMA Internal Medicine has been very receptive regarding HVPAA multicenter performance improvement guides and already published the 1st two, with two more of the papers in press. For the 2018 conference, the Journal of Hospital Medicine will review top scoring inpatient hospital abstracts to be considered for solicitation, and we are pursuing additional journals to similarly review medical, surgical, radiology and pediatric initiatives for solicitation as publications.
The HVPAA annual conference aims to disseminate performance improvement work related to high value practice on a national scale and evaluate quality and safety outcomes. Outcomes assessments ensure that care refinement will not compromise providers' ability to diagnose and treat patients. Changing long-standing provider practice patterns has proven challenging, necessitating determination of which interventions most effectively influence prescribing and ordering behavior.
