Two New Beacon Communities

The Greater Cincinnati HealthBridge (Cincinnati, OH) and Southeastern Michigan Health Association (Detroit, MI) are the two newest Beacon Community awardees.

The Greater Cincinnati HealthBridge, serving a 16-county area spanning three states, will work with its partners to build upon an advanced health information exchange to deploy new quality improvement and care coordination initiatives focusing on patients with pediatric asthma and adult diabetes. This program will use health IT tools and resources to provide streamlined and secure clinical information and decision support tools to physicians, health systems, federally qualified health centers, and critical access hospitals. The community collaboration will also provide patients and their families with timely access to data, knowledge, and tools to make more informed decisions and to manage their own health and health care.

The Southeastern Michigan Health Association and its community partners will focus its efforts on preventing and better managing diabetes using health IT tools and resources. Specifically, this effort will focus on coordinating care across health care settings by improving the availability of patient information at the point of care, redesigning patient care work processes, and applying quality improvement and other change management strategies to improve the quality and efficiency of diabetes care in the greater Detroit area.