Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative

The Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative (PRHI) is an independent catalyst for improving healthcare safety and quality in southwestern Pennsylvania. It operates on the premise that dramatic quality improvement is the best cost containment strategy for healthcare.

Created in 1997, PRHI was the first regional consortium of medical, business and civic leaders to address healthcare safety and quality improvement as a social and business imperative. Turning its own community into a demonstration lab, PRHI strives to accelerate improvement and set the pace for the nation. Its experiment reflects three principles:

1. Healthcare is local—federal policy changes alone cannot achieve needed reform
2. Those who work at the point of care develop quality and safety improvements that work and last
3. Continuous improvement in quality and safety requires the highest possible standard, namely perfection—to settle for less limits achievement

PRHI offers healthcare leaders the necessary tools, expertise, education, models and networks to perfect patient care and safety in their organizations. Using the Toyota Production System as a model, PRHI developed a quality improvement method for clinical settings known as Perfecting Patient Care^sm.

Thousands across the nation have already learned how Perfecting Patient Care^sm can transform healthcare. Together, they demonstrate the value of quality engineering in any healthcare setting—from neighborhood clinics, to hospitals and nursing homes.

PRHI is a nonprofit operating arm of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation with funding from local corporations, foundations, health plans and government contracts and grants.

Goals for the Initiative

At the clinic level, the primary goal of PRHI and our partner clinics was to realize improved patient outcomes, quality of care delivery and patient and staff satisfaction via practice transformation to patient-centered medical homes (PCMHs). To that end, practice sites strove to:

• Improve partnerships between patients and care teams
• Improve clinical outcome measures for patients with chronic diseases
• Increase knowledge of how to “mine” data to inform quality improvement efforts
• Improve teamwork to yield enhanced staff morale and patient care delivery
• Reduce avoidable hospital readmissions, yielding improved patient care and a demonstrated return on investment
• Improve efficiency of care delivery processes
• Improve knowledge and skills related to quality improvement to decrease no-show rates, improve patient access and reduce non-value added work
• Achieve NCQA Level 2 PCMH Recognition

At the policy level, we challenged existing reimbursement and policy barriers to implementation and sustainability of the Patient-Centered Medical Home Model. The stakeholder advisory group, consisting of representatives from local and state government, Medicaid and commercial insurers, consumer health organizations and other key groups, worked together to identify and implement reimbursement and policy strategies to support the sustainability of high-performing medical homes.

Partner Clinics

• East Liberty Family Health Care Center
  • East Liberty
    See a snapshot of this clinic’s work in the SNMHI
  • Lincoln-Lemington
• Metro Family Practice
• North Side Christian Health Center
  • North Side
  • Northview Heights
• Primary Health Network
  • Beaver Falls Primary Care
• Sto-Rox Neighborhood Health Council
  • Sto-Rox Neighborhood Family Health Center
  • Hilltop Community Health Center
• Squirrel Hill Health Center
• University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
  • Matilda Theiss Health Center

Links

• Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative

Key Contact

Tina Hahn
Medical Home Facilitator
thahn@prhi.org