Change doesn’t just happen. It requires bold leadership, innovative thinking, resourcefulness, and an unwavering determination to swim against the tide when necessary.
So where will we find the leaders we so desperately need to bring change to our unwieldy and dysfunctional health care system? Practice Change Leaders for Aging and Health, a new national program co-funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation and The Atlantic Philanthropies, represents a significant step toward answering that question.
Starting on Jan. 1, 2013, the Practice Change Leaders Program will choose 10 health care leaders per year for three years through a rigorous, competitive application process. Those selected will receive one year of funding to complete innovative projects and expand their effectiveness as organizational leaders.
The Hartford Foundation and our partners at The Atlantic Philanthropies will each contribute $1.5 million to support the Practice Change Leaders Program, which will be based at the University of Colorado Denver’s Division of Health Care Policy and Research.
The program will focus on four core topics that are at the heart of what the Hartford Foundation believes is necessary to improve the health, cost and quality of care for our nation’s older adults:
• enhanced primary care
• accountable care organizations
• transitional care and reduction of hospital readmissions
• programs designed to meet the needs of dually eligible Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries
The first cohort of 10 leaders will be open exclusively to doctors, nurses, social workers, and others who have completed the year-long intensive training and development through the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Innovation Advisors Program. (For more on this program, read Pioneering Paths to Better Care, Better Health and Lower Costs and Igniting Change: The Innovation Advisors Program.)
Future Practice Change Leader cohorts will be open to a broader pool of health care leaders, not just those in the Innovation Advisors Program, which is sponsored by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, created under the Affordable Care Act.
In many ways, the new Practice Change Leaders Program is the logical extension of both the Innovation Advisors and the highly successful Practice Change Fellows Program, which also has been co-funded by the Hartford Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies since 2007. (For more on the Practice Change Fellows Program, read Effective Leadership Improves Care of Older Adults and Practice Change Fellows Improve Federally Qualified Health Centers .)
And it also is a clear example of the Hartford Foundation’s new strategic commitment to focus more on directly addressing the immediate and fast-growing need to improve the quality of health care for older adults before the system is swept under the burgeoning demographic tide of aging Americans.
Leadership, like change, doesn’t just happen. It needs to be mentored and requires a deep understanding of what it takes to effect real policy change in a system that is stubbornly resistant to change. It also takes the ability to collaborate across professions and disciplines.
The Practice Change Fellows and the Innovation Advisors Program are doing a great job of instilling these skills in those who will become the vanguard of change in a system that needs to be transformed.
Now, the new Practice Change Leaders Program will support those change agents in the essential work ahead of them to make our health care system more responsive, efficient, and cost-effective for older adults.
New Year’s Day always brings with it the hope for change and better days. Thanks to the Practice Change Leaders Program, there is even more reason for optimism in health care circles for the coming year.