To thrive as individual health care organizations and a collective community, Health Centers must demonstrate value. Health Centers must support each other in exceeding the high standards and expectations of patients, partners, peers, funders, communities, supporters, critics, staff and providers. This requires an engaged community and active leadership committed to supporting success through building a Culture of Excellence.
What is a Culture of Excellence?
The Culture of Excellence is an effort of the Performance Excellence Committee (PEC) of the WPHCA board to support Health Centers in collective improvement efforts and encouraging organizational models where leadership, managers, front-line staff, and providers are all engaged, communicative and committed to advancing the success of their Health Center and Community. Each Health Center participates in the Culture of Excellence by engaging with resources and tools, and sharing lessons, best practices and data transparently with each other. Health Center’s uniqueness is respected by supporting their strategic priorities, characteristics and challenges.
Building off of a long history of transparent data sharing among Health Centers in the state, the Culture of Excellence kicked off in 2017 with individualized monitoring and outreach to Health Centers around five priority measures and the development of toolkits and training/technical assistance to support improvement in processes and performance. Learning and resources were shared between Health Centers to encourage spread of promising practices.
As the effort has evolved, the Culture of Excellence is now focused on capturing and spreading the stories of promising practices from Health Centers and sharing them broadly. The goal is to help elevate Health Centers to the top of their game, understanding that each Health Center has different patient populations and barriers to overcome, but that the north star is creating a “Culture of Excellence” statewide.
For support on your Health Center’s work, contact WPHCA or a member of the Performance Excellence Committee.
Culture of Excellence Highlights
Diabetes Success at Progressive Community Health Centers
As is true in many primary care settings, diabetes and hypertension
continue to be the greatest mortality/morbidity diagnoses seen at
Progressive Community Health Centers (“Progressive”), making these
diagnoses a continued area of focus for quality improvement efforts. Over the past year (October 2021-October 2022), Progressive has consistently maintained performance of 17%-21% in the uncontrolled diabetes measure (source: WPHCA Core Metrics Quarterly Reports). This means that usually no more than a fifth of the patients with diabetes have HbA1c levels greater than 9, which is a common marker of uncontrolled diabetes.
With this high level performance, they are consistently performing at or above the 90th Percentile in the UDS Uncontrolled Diabetes measure at both a state and national level. This story highlights the initiatives and practices in place at Progressive that support sustained positive health outcomes for patients with diabetes. Progressive Community Health Centers is located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and served over 14,500 patients in 2021.
