The Center for Healthcare Research and Transformation (CHRT), an independent nonprofit impact organization housed at the University of Michigan, is the new host organization for the Michigan Community Health Worker Alliance (MiCHWA), an organization that works to advance and train community health workers across the state and achieve policies that lead to sustainable financing of CHW programs.

As part of the agreement, MiCHWA’s two full-time staff members will be housed in CHRT’s office. Previously, MiCHWA was hosted at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, but sought a new home to provide additional health-related connections needed to launch a statewide registry of community health workers, as well as offer policy expertise to promote evidence-based policy change.

“MiCHWA thanks the University of Michigan School of Social Work for providing a supportive home for our birth and rapid growth since 2011. Our move to CHRT is an exciting development. CHRT’s policy, research, and communications strengths, combined with its commitment to community health workers, will further MiCHWA’s statewide efforts to promote and sustain CHWs,” says Edie Kieffer, M.P.H., Ph.D., MiCHWA co-founder and steering committee member, and Professor of Social Work at the U-M School of Social Work.

Community health workers help link individuals to the health and social services available in their communities, playing a key role in increasing community members’ health knowledge and empowerment, ensuring they receive culturally sensitive care.

MiCHWA and the steering committee that guides MICWHA’s work are currently focused on the following four key areas:

• Expanding community health worker (CHW) training across Michigan, including new training sites in Northern Michigan, the Upper Peninsula, Muskegon, and Battle Creek.
• Building an online CHW Registry, set to launch this September, that will serve both CHWs and CHW employers by providing a centralized system for Michigan CHWs to post their professional profiles and MiCHWA CHW training certificates, and for employers to post CHW positions.
• Working with partner organizations and MiCHWA work groups to promote policies that will promote continued, long-term CHW sustainability.
• Strengthening communications among CHWs and stakeholders through the MiCHWA CHW Network, which serves as a vehicle for CHWs to connect, share resources, offer support, and plan networking activities

“Hosting MiCHWA provides CHRT an exciting opportunity to contribute to and help accelerate the evidence-based work related to the critical role Community Health Workers can play in increasing access to health care,” says Marianne Udow-Phillips, CHRT’s executive director.

For further questions, contact a member of CHRT at chrt-info@umich.edu or call 734-998-7555.

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About the Center for Healthcare Research & Transformation (CHRT)
Founded in 2007, CHRT is an independent 501(c)(3) impact organization at the University of Michigan. CHRT’s experts work with decision makers to improve population health as well as healthcare access and quality by transforming healthcare research and evidence into actionable policy approaches. CHRT’s affiliation with the University of Michigan affords access to a wide array of subject matter and clinical experts.

About the Michigan Community Health Worker Alliance (MiCHWA)

MiCHWA is a statewide alliance comprised of community health workers, organizational partners and other community health worker (CHW) supporters who work to promote and sustain the integration of CHWs  into health and human services organizations throughout Michigan through coordinated changes in policy and workforce development. Housed at the Center for Healthcare Research & Transformation, MiCHWA began in 2011 at the University of Michigan School of Social Work.

The Center for Healthcare Research and Transformation (CHRT), in collaboration with the University of Michigan’s Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI),  received a $55,380 grant from the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Foundation to develop a tool to help assess a state’s capacity to launch a statewide Choosing Wisely® campaign.

An initiative of the ABIM Foundation in partnership with Consumer Reports, Choosing Wisely encourages clinicians and patients to engage in conversations aimed at reducing unnecessary care. To date, more than 75 medical specialty societies have collectively published more than 485 tests and treatments they say are overused and should be discussed.

“Choosing Wisely has helped stimulate a national—and now international—conversation about reducing waste and overuse thanks to the leadership of our medical specialty society partners, as well as Consumer Reports and its important patient-education efforts,” said Daniel B. Wolfson, MHSA, the ABIM Foundation’s executive vice president and chief operating officer.

“While the Choosing Wisely campaign is widely recognized as a leading movement in this area, we believe more work is needed to ensure conversations between clinicians and patients happen consistently across all care settings. CHRT and IHPI’s work will help us better understand what tools and resources states will need to advance Choosing Wisely in their communities.”

For example, in Michigan, a variety of Choosing Wisely-focused initiatives and projects are currently active and led independently by providers, payers and other organizations across the state. However, the lack of a centralized system or mechanism that allows these independently-managed efforts to share resources, data or learnings hinders opportunities to collaborate and learn from one another.

To develop a way to unite these currently fragmented efforts, the team of CHRT and IHPI researchers, led by CHRT’S Research and Evaluation Director, Melissa Riba, will first develop and validate a set of criteria to assess what makes an effective, high-functioning Choosing Wisely state-level initiative.

Using that framework, the team will then create and test a tool to assess a state’s readiness to engage in an effort that unites existing Choosing Wisely efforts across the state and also provides the foundation for new initiatives to develop. The tool will be tested in Michigan.

“Many healthcare organizations are beginning to focus on Choosing Wisely and related efforts to make sure patients get the care they need, but not care that is unnecessary or maybe harmful.  We want to understand how these organizations can best work together to improve appropriate healthcare delivery throughout Michigan,” says Eve Kerr, M.D., M.P.H., professor of Internal Medicine and IHPI leadership team member at the University of Michigan and director of the VA Center for Clinical Management Research.

Adds Marianne Udow-Phillips, CHRT’s Executive Director: “Our work supporting the ABIM Foundation and the Choosing Wisely campaign is a natural extension of previous CHRT work on identifying low value care in our healthcare system. Helping states create coordinated campaigns around such efforts is an important evolution of the Choosing Wisely mission.”

 

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About CHRT

Founded in 2007, the Center for Healthcare Research & Transformation (CHRT) is an independent 501(c)(3) impact organization at the University of Michigan. CHRT’s experts work with decision makers to improve population health as well as healthcare access and quality by transforming healthcare research and evidence into actionable policy approaches. CHRT’s affiliation with the University of Michigan affords access to a wide array of subject matter and clinical experts.