Improving healthcare value through clinical community and supply chain collaboration.

Background: We hypothesized that integrating supply chain with clinical communities would allow for clinician-led supply cost reduction and improved value in an academic health system.

Methods: Three clinical communities (spine, joint, blood management) and one clinical community-like physician led team of surgeon stakeholders partnered with the supply chain team on specific supply cost initiatives. The teams reviewed their specific utilization and cost data, and the physicians led consensus-building conversations over a series of team meetings to agree to standard supply utilization.

Clinical Communities at Johns Hopkins Medicine: An Emerging Approach to Quality Improvement.

Background: Clinical communities are an emerging approach to quality improvement (QI) to which several large-scale projects have attributed some success. In 2011 the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality established clinical communities as a core strategy to connect frontline providers from six different hospitals to improve quality of care, patient safety, and value across the health system. CLINICAL COMMUNITIES: Fourteen clinical communities that presented great opportunity for improvement were established.