Community Coalition Building

The Beatles song, “With a Little Help from My Friends”, could very well be the theme song for the statewide community coalition effort designed to get healthcare providers talking, interacting and sharing solutions.

A community coalition is a diverse group of healthcare stakeholders who collectively desire to improve all aspects of healthcare for a specified geographical area. Each community operates autonomously, while focusing on these shared clinical outcomes and challenges:

• Keeping patients and families safe throughout the healthcare journey
• Increasing access to high quality, integrated behavioral healthcare
• Tackling the opioid epidemic
• Improving chronic disease self-management through patient-centered approaches
• Improving healthcare delivery in nursing homes
• Reducing unnecessary hospitalizations
• Increasing medication safety
• Decreasing adverse drug events

Qsource serves as a community organizer, partner and supporter. In Indiana, there are currently ten community coalitions led by Qsource and consisting of stakeholders from across the entire continuum of care.

This is where you can make a difference.

Your knowledge and experience is valuable to the success of the collaborative. While uniquely different, many of the challenges providers face are similar and cross over into each other’s realm of care. Each member shares the vision of collaborating and encouraging the efforts of one another. Together, coalition members build and sustain an affiliation with a focus on improving care for people in their community.

Community coalition building makes efficient use of limited resources. By connecting the community together, collective efforts can achieve tangible, data-driven change. Members share knowledge, insight and aggregate data in order to evaluate and improve healthcare quality in their area.

Patients and caregivers are included in community coalitions where they are provided a platform for their voices to be heard. They become Consumer Advisors and lend their experiences and insight to help providers deliver person-centered care that meets patients’ needs. They are an important part of the community coalition process.

So are nursing homes. They play a key role in community-based work.

Many of the statewide efforts that community coalitions focus on span multiple provider settings. This involves more than just a patient transitioning from home to hospital to nursing home care. It involves specific clinical focuses, such as behavioral health, opioid prescribing, reducing adverse drug events and infections.

As providers determine whether to become involved with a community coalition, they often ask themselves “what is the benefit of being a member?”. Most members acknowledge networking opportunities and information sharing are the greatest benefits. As each provider discovers their peers are working on similar initiatives, their shared outcomes and audiences are easier to reach.

Together, Qsource and Indiana’s healthcare community are building a network of advocates dedicated to strengthening the voice of patients, providers and communities wherever decisions shaping the future of the health system are being made.

After all, healthcare is not a silo and we all need a little help from our friends from time to time.