November marked the 30th anniversary of the founding of The Carolinas Center for Medical Excellence (CCME), one of the first organizations in the Carolinas to promote safer, more efficient patient care. Funded by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), CCME focuses on three aims to improve the delivery of care throughout North and South Carolina: better patient care, better population health, and lowering health care costs. Stimulating collaboration and innovation among large-scale networks of health care providers, community leaders, and Medicare beneficiaries, CCME champions patient-centered care, using the “voice of the patient” to guide their efforts.
“Improving the quality of health care is what has always driven CCME,” said CCME Board President and former North Carolina Medical Society President John Mangum, MD. “This organization has been instrumental in all things related to health care quality improvement in the Carolinas.”
CCME’s current work as part of its 10th federal contract with CMS addresses the needs of beneficiary populations by implementing quality improvement initiatives focused on:
- Reducing hospital readmissions
- Preventing health care-acquired infections
- Preventative health screenings and measures
- Person-centered care in nursing homes
- Preventing adverse drug events
- Providing technical assistance to providers
At the outset, CCME “realized that the old approach of identifying and sanctioning physicians who performed poorly was not the most productive approach,” Dr. Mangum said. “Instead, we needed to improve processes within the delivery of care to reduce the complications of care and to improve short- and long-term outcomes.”
CCME worked collectively with the medical community, its stakeholders, and other QIOs to share information and resources, setting the stage to change the mindsets and actions of how providers deliver care to Medicare patients. Collaboration, education, and leadership became the cornerstones of CCME’s quality improvement efforts.
