Partnership for Patients: Task 2 Evaluation Progress Report / February 2014

The Partnership for Patients (PfP) campaign was launched in April 2011 with the ambitious goals of reducing preventable hospital-acquired conditions (HACs) by 40 percent and 30-day hospital readmissions by 20 percent. To reduce harm at this level of magnitude, the campaign implemented a strategy to align all health care stakeholders, including federal and other public and private health care payors, providers, and patients, to focus on this issue concurrently. By influencing everyone to move in the same direction at the same time, the program strove to overcome the inherently limited reach of any single initiative operating in a complex environment. The three major components of the campaign, conceptualized as “engines,” are the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) investment engine, the federal partner alignment engine, and the outside partner engine. The program is national in scope, due to its level of implementation. For example, over 70 percent of general acute care hospitals in the United States (U.S.), representing over 80 percent of admissions, worked with PfP-funded Hospital Engagement Networks (HENs) during 2012-2013.

Purpose of the Report

The goal of the evaluation is to assess the harm reduction during the period when all three engines (CMMI, federal partners, and private partners) were engaged simultaneously in an extraordinary effort to meet the common goals. This report provides an interim assessment of the PfP campaign’s progress towards reducing hospital-acquired harms, based on the synthesis of evidence across multiple data sources and using multiple analytic techniques. The national scale of PfP makes it challenging to assess its overall impacts, as there is little opportunity to identify the progress that would be made in its absence. However, it is important to assess PfP’s overall progress towards its goals, even if more rigorous analyses examining specific features or components of PfP must wait for more complete data to become available.