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:
Role of Purchasers and Insurers in meeting the STEEP 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:
Reengineering care processes to reduce mistakes will require investments, for which purchasers should create incentives.
BTE and eHI Business Agreement
Bridges to Excellence has formed a new business relationship with the eHealth Initiative (eHI), a multi-stakeholder organization that supports the use of health information exchange to drive improvements in the quality, safety and efficiency of healthcare in hundreds of communities nationwide. The operations of BTE are now managed and monitored by eHI as a result of a shared services agreement. As of April 2006, eHI provides administrative and management support that further enhances BTE’s ability to grow on a variety of levels.