About Us
NCQHA

History

NCHQA began in 2006 when a broad array of players came together at the invitation of the governor of North Carolina. In 2008, the Governor’s Quality Initiative (GQI) became NCHQA, an independent non-profit organization.

NCHQA’s first project was the promotion of evidence-based standards in primary care practices. To support this “best practice” approach, NCHQA organized training and support to physician practices and measurement of health care quality using nationally recognized standards for care for specific health conditions. We adopted common quality measures for the treatment of chronic diseases.

On-the-ground support and leadership were provided by North Carolina’s Improving Performance in Practice (IPIP) program. NCHQA and IPIP recruited primary care practices willing to improve their delivery of chronic disease care; provided training, support and tools to assist those practices in improving the quality of care; and provided feedback to practices regarding their performance in meeting quality standards. By mid-2010, more than 180 practices throughout North Carolina were receiving hands-on support with practice redesign and quality improvement.

In 2010, the North Carolina Area Health Education Centers program (AHEC) became the state’s federally-designated Regional Extension Center (REC), receiving federal funds to support implementation of electronic medical records in North Carolina physician practices. At that time, AHEC also became the administrator of the IPIP program. By directly building on IPIP’s quality improvement work in North Carolina, AHEC is able to fully integrate quality improvement into its support services and help practices implement technology to improve the quality of health care. North Carolina is the only state in which health care quality improvement goals and health information technology support are seamlessly integrated. This quality improvement program continues to receive guidance and partial financial support from NCHQA.

For more information on AHEC’s practice-based primary care services, please visit http://www.ahecqualitysource.com/


Current Projects

Recent federal health reform and economic stimulus legislation dramatically broadened opportunities to improve the delivery of health care. In response to this changing landscape, NCHQA expanded its goals beyond its initial mission improvement of primary care delivery. NCHQA’s multi-stakeholder structure and long history of cooperation toward common goals provides the opportunity to achieve health care improvements that would have been deemed impossible not long ago.

NCHQA is currently pursuing projects in three areas:
  1. Leading, supporting and encouraging projects to bring coordinated care to all patients regardless of payer. The best health care systems in the world offer integrated care. Systems like the Mayo Clinic and Geisinger Health System own hospitals and labs and employ all the physicians and nurses a patient is likely to see, so they can easily integrate a patient’s care. In contrast, patients in North Carolina and throughout America typically obtain their care from a variety of independent providers. Health care expenses are paid by a variety of sources including private insurers, employers, the government and patients themselves. But unlike any other state, or even any large geographic area, North Carolina has the capacity to create a “virtually” integrated system, one that can provide the same integrated care but across an entire state. Pilot programs in North Carolina are experimenting with different ways to coordinate care for all patients, regardless of the physician they visit or who pays for their care. NCHQA supports and advises these pilot projects and is working toward a system in which any patient anywhere in North Carolina has access to fully integrated and coordinated care.
  2. Collaborating with primary care physicians, specialists, hospitals, CCNC and other appropriate providers to improve transitions, reduce readmissions, and generally improve quality of care across providers. When patients transition between providers and health care settings, the result is often poor health outcomes, medical errors and costly duplication of tests and procedures. Through partnerships with other organizations and providers, NCHQA is seeking ways to better coordinate care and address systemic problems that cause dangerous and costly gaps in care.
  3. Convening stakeholders across North Carolina to develop common quality reporting standards, with the goal of increasing transparency and reducing the impact of multiple reporting standards on providers. NCHQA’s early work included establishing a set of standard measures by which insurers and physicians could measure the quality of care provided by a primary care physician for particular chronic diseases. NCHQA is currently pursuing ways to make quality of care information more transparent and accessible to health care providers, policy makers and patients.
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