The Quest Strategic Planning Committee identifies specific healthcare issues that are in need of improvement. These issues become Quest "projects," and our quality improvement teams use proven strategic methods to get at the heart of these issues and define real solutions.

Improving our population's health and driving quality health improvements in our community are at the core of Quality Quest's initiatives.

Population Health

An important part of our strategy and initiatives is to improve community health by looking at healthcare from a broader perspective—a population view of health. Population health can be defined as a perspective of health based on research that seeks improvement for an entire population. Besides medical care, this perspective also takes into account factors such as income, social status, gender, culture, personal health practices, physical environments, social support networks, education, employment and working conditions. Advancing a population view of health depends on the following critical strategies:

• Health is a collective responsibility. It takes all healthcare stakeholders working together to have a positive impact.
• Prevention and promotion work hand in hand.
• Decisions must be based on good evidence.

Value in Healthcare

Another focus of our initiatives is building value in healthcare. People believe in value. They search for the best quality product at the most reasonable price. Americans want value for the money they spend.

Yet, how do we define and measure value when it comes to healthcare services? For the most part, we don't. Patients hope they receive quality services—whether it is a physician's office visit, a test, a treatment or a surgery. Value in healthcare is difficult to determine because:

• Quality of care varies dramatically between doctors and hospitals, but those differences are invisible to patients.
• Payments reward quantity over quality and fixing problems over preventing them.
• Lack of standard performance results makes it impossible to know which practices are doing a good job, and those that are not.
• Consumers lack information to make the choices that are right for them.*

The role of Quality Quest for Health of Illinois and our initiatives is bringing healthcare participants—patients and families, clinicians, hospitals, health plans and employers—to the same table to agree on areas where we can work together.

*Pacific Business Group on Health