President's Letter
Dear Colleagues,
CFAH is working to ensure that everyone is prepared to live a healthy life and make good choices about their health and health care. Since it was founded in 1992, CFAH has aimed to increase the influence of evidence on health-related behavior and its determinants in the development of policies, practices and programs that draw this evidence to produce better health outcomes.2009 marks the sharpening of our focus. We have modestly tweaked our name from the Center for the Advancement of Health to the Center for Advancing Health and we added a new tag line: Evidence. Engagement. Equity. to reflect our efforts toward increasing people's involvement in their health and health care based on scientific evidence with the aim of advancing fairness and equity.
While advances in knowledge about disease have been responsible for a steady increase in the length and quality of life of Americans, the potential of health care to improve individual and population health rests increasingly in the hands of individuals. Whether we are sick or well, we will not benefit from the expertise of health professionals and the technologies they deploy unless we participate knowledgably in our own care over time.
The stakes for each of us — and the nation — are high: our non-participation wastes precious health care resources, contributes to preventable illness and death and further erodes the health status of those who are unable to engage in our care.
What can be done to ensure that all Americans can perform each of these actions? And how will we help those who lack the skills, resources or understanding, or who are already ill compensate for their inability to do so? Our current activities are directed toward answering these questions.
- The "Engagement Behavior Framework," a comprehensive list of the actions each person must now take to benefit from their care (web address) serves as the roadmap for our work.
- The Patient Guide for clinical practices provides a template that orients patients to how they can engage more efficiently and effectively with their health care provider's services.
- Similarly, the PACT is a model agreement that can be used by patient-centered medical homes to introduce this new approach to care by making explicit the responsibilities of both the patient and the health care team.
- The increased availability of decision support tools in health care — and the public's lack of interest in using them — was the impetus of the "Getting Tools Used" initiative, which draws lessons from case studies on popular tools outside of health care to improve the public's ability to use comparative quality and treatment decision tools to make choices consistent with their needs and preferences.
Sincerely,
Jessie C. Gruman, Ph.D.
President
Center for Advancing Health
