Bridges to Excellence Mission
Bridges to Excellence is a not-for-profit organization developed by employers, physicians, health care services, researchers, and other industry experts with a mission to create significant leaps in the quality of care by recognizing and rewarding health care providers who demonstrate that they have implemented comprehensive solutions in the management of patients and deliver safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable and patient-centered care.
Bridges to Excellence: Rewarding Quality across the Healthcare System
In 2001, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) published a report entitled "Crossing the Quality Chasm". To bridge this chasm, the IOM identified six key attributes around which the health care system should be redesigned - Safe, Timely, Effective, Efficient, Equitable, and Patient-centered (STEEEP).
Redesigning the healthcare system around these attributes is not easy and requires changes at every level, including:
- Environments such as insurers, purchasers and regulators
- Organizations such as hospitals and medical groups
- Micro-environments such as office practices and hospital units
- Individual clinicians
- And at the center, the patient
Role of Purchasers and Insurers in meeting the STEEEP challenge and BTE's Guiding Principles
In one major recommendation, the IOM said payments for care should be redesigned to encourage providers to make positive changes to their care processes. Ideally, this shift will begin with purchasers and insurers, and filter down through the delivery system to help encourage improvements at all levels.
In response to this challenge, a group of employers, physicians, health plans and patients have come together to create Bridges to Excellence. Guided by three principles, its purpose is to create programs that will realign everyone's incentives around higher quality. These three principles are:
- Dedication to transforming care processes to reduce mistakes will require investments, for which purchasers should create incentives
- Significant reductions in defects (misuse, underuse, overuse) will reduce the waste and inefficiencies in the health care system today
- Increased accountability and quality improvements will be encouraged by the release of comparative provider performance data, delivered to consumers in a compelling way
Reengineering care processes to reduce mistakes will require investments, for which purchasers should create incentives.