Who We Are

WHO WE ARE: Maine Quality Counts (QC) is a regional health care collaborative committed to improving health and health care for the people of Maine. Formed in 2003 and incorporated in 2006, QC provides leadership, advocacy, and support for improving care. QC works through a broad group of stakeholders to coordinate disparate efforts to support local, patient-centered care and the resources that support them. QC’s goals are to improve health, promote consistent delivery of high-quality care, improve access to care, and contain health care costs.

OUR MISSION: QC is transforming health and health care in Maine by leading, collaborating, and aligning improvement efforts.

OUR VISION: Through the active engagement and alignment of people, communities, and health care partners, every person in Maine will enjoy the best of health and have access to patient-centered care that is uniformly high quality, equitable, and efficient.

OUR STRATEGIC PRIORITIES ARE TO:

1. Further increase system alignment to transform health and health care;
2. Promote a sustainable system of quality improvement assistance to all providers in Maine;
3. Foster meaningful consumer engagement in transforming health and health care in Maine;
4. Promote integration of behavioral and physical health; and
5. Assure the organizational success and sustainability of QC needed to meet our mission.

WHAT WE DO: QC works collaboratively throughout the state to improve quality, promote public reporting of performance, engage consumers, and share information.

HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED: QC members are part of a nationally recognized initiative making great strides in improving health and health care for the people of Maine. QC provides an impartial forum where diverse stakeholders can exchange views and share ideas in an open and unbiased environment. Go to www.mainequalitycounts.org to learn about getting involved.

MAJOR PROGRAMS:

Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q), a national initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) designed to help communities across the country improve the quality of health care within their geographic region, is part of RWJF's continuing effort to close the gap between the quality of health care that Americans now receive and what the health care system is capable of delivering. The foundational premise of the AF4Q initiative is that no single person, group, or profession can improve the quality of care without the support of others. Maine is one of 15 communities selected from across the country to participate in this initiative. The AF4Q initiative in Maine, led by QC in close partnership with the Maine Health Management Coalition (MHMC) and the Dirigo Health Agency’s Maine Quality Forum (MQF), works with numerous stakeholder groups, including consumers, health care providers, purchasers, insurers, and public health organizations, to improve health care by aligning efforts within and across three areas or forces: quality improvement, public reporting, and consumer engagement with a particular focus on reducing disparities. Read More about Aligning Forces for Quality.

The Hospital Quality Network (HQN) is an AF4Q effort to improve care delivery in hospital settings. In Maine, teams from 11 hospitals are working together to improve the quality and safety of patient care by piloting and testing new improvement strategies. Maine HQN teams are working on one or more of the following areas: reducing hospital readmissions for patients with heart failure; improving flow through hospital emergency departments; and improving language services to better communicate with diverse patients.

Transforming Care at the Bedside (TCAB) is an innovative, nurse-led AF4Q program that empowers nurses and other frontline staff to redesign their work to achieve better results for patients. This leads to higher-quality care and more satisfied nurses who stay on their jobs and get to do more of what they went into nursing to do—work with patients and their families.

Maine Quality Counts leads the Maine Regional TCAB Collaborative that includes 21 nurse-led teams from 13 Maine hospitals and one skilled nursing facility working to improve care in many areas, including:

•             Reducing falls

•             Reducing pressure ulcers

•             Improving coordination of care by increasing time spent at the patient’s bedside

Read More about Transforming Care at the Bedside

The Maine Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) Pilot is the result of MHMC, MQF, and QC recognizing the essential role of primary care in our health care system and working together to lead this important effort. The 26 participating practices include a diverse mix of 22 adult and four pediatric practices from around the state that were selected for their demonstrated leadership and commitment to the principles of the PCMH model; their diversity of practice size, location, and ownership; and their ability to link with and leverage existing improvement opportunities going on across the state.

As part of their participation in the Pilot, practices are expected to implement a set of ten core expectations addressing key practice changes and are supported in their continued efforts to transform to a more patient-centered model of care. The ultimate goal of this effort is to sustain and revitalize primary care to improve health outcomes and reduce overall health care costs. Planning and implementation of the PCMH Pilot is being directed by a multi-stakeholder working group and supported by many organizations in addition to MHMC, MQF, and QC, including the Maine Health Access Foundation, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Martin’s Point Health Care, the Davis Family Foundation, the Betterment Fund, and the Bingham Foundation. Read More about the Maine Patient Centered Medical Home.

Community Care Teams (of the Maine PCMH Pilot) are being implemented in recognition of the fact that many patients have needs and barriers to care that reach beyond the capacity of even the most robust primary care physician practice. QC is working with the PCMH Pilot to create a sustainable structure and payment system to support community-based, multi-disciplinary primary care-integrated Community Care Teams (CCTs). CCTs are a key element in QC’s efforts to improve care and reduce avoidable costs for Maine people, especially those with complex or chronic conditions.

The CCT model has been established and found to be highly successful in other communities and states, such as North Carolina and Vermont, and provides help for people to work with their primary care provider and community self-management resources to improve quality and patient experience of care, prevent complications and avoidable hospitalizations, and reduce costs, particularly around transitions of care, such as reducing avoidable emergency department use and hospitalizations. Read More about the Community Care Teams.

First STEPS Learning Initiative: There is strong evidence of barriers that prevent children enrolled in MaineCare from receiving adequate levels of evidence-based preventive services. To help address these gaps, Maine Quality Counts is leading the First STEPS (Strengthening Together Early Preventive Services) Learning Initiative, a comprehensive effort to provide outreach, education, and quality improvement support to primary care practices to improve rates of early, periodic, screening, diagnosis, and treatment (EPSDT) services. This effort is part of the Improving Health Outcomes for Children (IHOC) program.  QC is working with more than 20 teams participating in the First STEPS initiative to improve care in the following areas:

Child and adolescent immunizations
Screening for early identification of developmental delays
Screening and prevention of obesity to promote healthy behaviors and healthy weight

Read More about the First STEPS Learning Initiative.

Behavioral Health Integration Metrics Initiative: Maine Quality Counts recognizes the need for health care providers to address both behavioral and physical health issues, and to better integrate the behavioral and physical health care needs of patients in order to improve health and health care. With support from the Maine Health Access Foundation, QC is leading an effort to develop and implement a set of performance measures of behavioral health integration in primary care that can be used in public reporting of quality data.  These measures include:

• Integrating behavioral health care in primary care settings
• Screening for depression
• Patient experience of care

Read More about the Behavioral Health Integration Metrics Initiative.

Electronic Health Record (EHR) Adoption and Meaningful Use: In an effort to help Maine physicians and other providers adopt and use electronic health records (EHRs) to improve care, the federal government has established a program to provide incentive payments and assistance for EHR use. In Maine, HealthInfoNet is the state’s health information exchange and serves as the “Regional Extension Center” to support providers in their efforts to adopt EHRs to improve care and to meet requirements for federal incentive payments.

In their role as the Maine Regional Extension Center (MEREC), HealthInfoNet offers assistance to primary care physician practices to select, adopt, and use EHRs to improve patient care. HealthInfoNet and the MEREC have contracted with QC to provide quality improvement expertise, guidance, and support for linking EHR adoption with clinical improvement. QC is responsible for ensuring that the overall efforts of the MEREC and its vendors are guided by a framework of continuous quality improvement, aligning EHR adoption with other quality improvement efforts in the state, and supporting primary care providers to achieve meaningful use and meaningful improvements in care. Read More about the Electronic Health Record Adoption and Meaningful Use.

The Maine Quality Counts Learning Community (QCLC) is an effort to bring together existing networks of physician practices, such as the Maine Practice Improvement Network (MPIN), Physician Hospital Organizations (PHOs), and multi-site physician practices with other practice networks and individual physician practices to promote the spread of best practices throughout the state. The QCLC is planned as a major alignment activity of the AF4Q initiative and will assess current quality improvement capacity for physician practices across the state, identify gaps, and fill these gaps by offering opportunities to connect and facilitate collaborative learning. The QCLC will offer opportunities to learn from each other and from national experts through a regular e-newsletter; a web-based repository of quality improvement tools; periodic regional improvement meetings for providers and practice staff; and opportunities for direct practice-to-practice networking to observe the implementation of best practices. Read More about the Maine Quality Counts Learning Community.