$300 Million Commitment to Reduce Health Care Disparities

“Across America, there are serious gaps between the health care that people should receive and the care they actually receive,” said the president/CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in announcing a $300 million community-focused program to improve health care quality, reduce racial disparities and provide models for national reform.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the largest health care foundation in the U.S. According to its research, the quality of medical care people receive varies dramatically depending on their race and where they live. “These findings underscore the importance of the local health care system as the focus for efforts to improve care,” said Elliott Fisher, M.D., M.P.H., director of the Center for Health Policy Research at Dartmouth and one of the report’s co-authors. “In most regions, blacks are less likely to receive recommended care than whites, but the differences across regions are generally much larger than the differences within regions. And in some regions of the country, African Americans receive care equal to that of whites—but the care for everyone is well below the national average. These findings point to the critical importance of local efforts that bring together stakeholders to improve quality and reduce disparities everywhere.”

Hence the community-based approach of Aligning Forces for Quality, a “$300-million commitment to improve health care in 14 communities, that together cover 11 percent of the U.S. population. The communities involved were “selected as part of a highly competitive process to find communities that were positioned to make fundamental and cutting-edge changes to rebuild their health care systems.”

Along with this new initiative, the Foundation is also making available on its web a new program area, The Quality/Equality Program Area, which “features an expansive library of new interventions, tools, resources and related videos to help providers and others improve the quality of care in their communities. These Promising Practices have been developed based on the findings and lessons learned from RWJF-supported programs to improve health care quality in a variety of settings.”

For more about the initiative, see the website of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Today’s New York Times also contains a report about the Foundation’s research findings.