Commitments

Make a Public Commitment to Advancing Patient and Family Engagement

Participants in the convening ended the final day by declaring their commitment to take at least one action to promote change in their sphere of healthcare. You can view these commitments below. If you would like to contact a specific person about their commitment, you may send a message through the “Contact this Person” feature on the website. 

The following individuals and organizations have committed to these actions to advance patient and family engagement.

Recent Commitments

Lucinda Letson | Contact this person
Allenbrooke Rehab
Person centered care even for residents with dementia that are unable to easily communicate preferences through family involvement and past personal preference recognition.
Florence Harvey | Contact this person
CareBridgade
The CareBrigade Patient and Family Engagement System empowers Patients in interacting as engaged partners with their doctors, making informed choices in line with their own preferences, and, at the same time, engages friends and families (even at a distance), in providing emotional, spiritual, and practical support, including lay patient advocacy, for the Patient from the moment of diagnosis, thru extended treatments, surgeries, and during at-home recovery.
Abhishek Bhartia | Contact this person
Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research
Thanks to Dominick and Kristin for presenting the PFE Roadmap at WHO Geneva for the global consultation on patient and family engagement. Here is our commitment: We will close the patient feedback loop by sharing information with the care providers and begin sessions where providers can here stories directly from patients. We will begin the process of establishing a patient and family advisory council for our maternity service and involve them in collecting feedback, designing the service, and evaluating performance. We will seek patient and family input on follow-up activities for our maternity survey that shows widespread departures from evidence across the city of Delhi. 
Warren Kolber | Contact this person
MyDrMe
Using the "Roadmap' and other patient engagement studies, I am planning to assemble an advisory board and editorial team to develop standards, guidelines, and recommended practices for patient led health teams.
Karlin Schroeder | Contact this person
Parkinson's Disease Foundation
We hope to use the measurement and research portions of the roadmap to help us both strengthen old partnerships and build new ones between patients and researchers. We have a program called Parkinson's Advocates in Research www.pdf.org/pair that trains people with PD and their care partners to collaborate with research teams. They provide input into research priorities that are important to the communities, patient centered outcomes, study design and more.

Search Commitments

Patients and families willing to partner

Amer Haider | Contact this person
Doctella

We commit to providing free-to-use, best-in class tools for patients and families that will improve the way in which they engage and communicate with their healthcare team; tools that will improve safety, patient satisfaction and reduce costs.  Providers can start improving engagement for free by using our evidence based electronic (web, mobile) and paper tools.

Blair Van Brunt | Contact this person
RareDisease Perspectives LLC

I commit to providing a bridge from the patient's point of view to the pharma/biotech industry through creating patient-centered communications for industry from an authentic patient point of view as I am a mother of a patient with a rare, life-threatening disease and I have run a patient advocacy organization.

Casey Quinlan | Contact this person
Mighty Casey Media

I commit to being one of the bridges from the street to the system and to help identify patients who can help. Once invited in, we will transform the system for you.

David Andrews | Contact this person
Georgia Regents Medical Center

From a patient perspective, I commit to being engaged in this work and the process in any way that can help. 

Elizabeth Rankin | Contact this person
Med-Aware Publications

I am committed.

Helen Haskell | Contact this person
Mothers Against Medical Error/ Consumers Advancing Patient Safety

I am part of an extensive network of patients who would love to have their voices heard more clearly. If any of you need these voices in your work, we can offer them, and I can work with you.

Jason Wolf | Contact this person
The Beryl Institute

The Beryl Institute remains committed to bringing together the many voices, views and perspectives on improving the patient and family experience in healthcare and to fostering and sustaining the critical focus on patient, family and caregiver engagement needed to achieve better outcomes for all.

Jean Rexford | Contact this person
Connecticut Center for Patient Safety

I’m asking all of you for a commitment to fund the patient voice. We have so few resources. We have the stories, we have the commitment, we have the passion, we have the power, but we need funding.

Patient voices are growing. My organization, the Connecticut Center for Patient Safety, is committed in meeting your need for stories, participation on committees, and constructive feedback on improving what we all want—better and safer healthcare.

Lisa Freeman | Contact this person
Patient Advocacy of Connecticut

Representing the non-conflicted patient voice through the work that I do, I focus on patient safety issues, patient- and family-centered care, improving communication and transparency, & elimination of medical harm.  I am committed to opening up seats on hospital governing boards and committees to patient representatives as well as promoting patient education to further patient engagement at all levels of care.

Lucinda Letson | Contact this person
Allenbrooke Rehab

Person centered care even for residents with dementia that are unable to easily communicate preferences through family involvement and past personal preference recognition.

Mary Lynne Knighten | Contact this person
St. Francis Medical Center

I will serve as a mentor to other organizations and individuals to assist them with building the infrastructure for patient- and family-centered care and patient engagement.

Pat Mastors | Contact this person
Patient Voice Institute

I have an offer and an “ask.” I will help any organization seeking authentic patient perspective for their conferences, policy work or research purposes, by offering the resources of the newly formed Patient Voice Institute (PVI)."   My ask is that if you’re planning to attend a healthcare conference, ask if there will be patient and family voices included in the program. Commit to asking the question beforehand and let the organizers know it’s important to you; consider not attending if those voices are not included. There is also a free “Patients Included” download graphic you can put on your materials for your conference or event, to show that patient and family voices are indeed included. 

Randi Oster | Contact this person
RandiRedmondOster.com

I commit to help patients navigate the healthcare system with confidence and medical professionals understand the patient perspective.

Sorrel King | Contact this person
Josie King Foundation

The Josie King Foundation commits to continuing to help hospitals improve their culture of patient safety by providing tools and programs that are patient and family centered.

Warren Kolber | Contact this person
MyDrMe

Using the "Roadmap' and other patient engagement studies, I am planning to assemble an advisory board and editorial team to develop standards, guidelines, and recommended practices for patient led health teams.

Implementing change in healthcare

Abhishek Bhartia | Contact this person
Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research

Thanks to Dominick and Kristin for presenting the PFE Roadmap at WHO Geneva for the global consultation on patient and family engagement. Here is our commitment:

  1. We will close the patient feedback loop by sharing information with the care providers and begin sessions where providers can here stories directly from patients.
  2. We will begin the process of establishing a patient and family advisory council for our maternity service and involve them in collecting feedback, designing the service, and evaluating performance.
  3. We will seek patient and family input on follow-up activities for our maternity survey that shows widespread departures from evidence across the city of Delhi. 
Andy Carter | Contact this person
The Hospital & Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania

If people have an idea or pilot or a test you want to run, give me a call, and I will recruit participants from Pennsylvania from members of our association.

Second, I will nominate to the board of directors of our trade association a patient representative within one year.

Third, I will make sure that Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania’s (HAP)’s 2015 top ten organizational goals include a patient and family engagement goal.

Benjamin K. Chu | Contact this person
Kaiser Permanente Southern California

Every successful movement needs successful models. Therefore, I commit to work toward making Kaiser Permanente a model in everything we do.

Secondly, I will make a commitment to trying to keep patient and family engagement at the front and center of the American Hospital Association agenda so that when we conduct the survey (Assessing Patient and Family Engagement Strategies in U.S. Hospitals Survey reported on in the convening) in a year or two there will be much better results.

Bruce Bagley | Contact this person
TransforMED

In any given day, TransforMED interacts with over 500 primary care practices. I will commit to making sure that the patient and family engagement agenda is a key element of patient-centered medical home model we help people create.

I will encourage the four current recognition and accreditation groups to make sure patient engagement is included in the evaluation.

Debra Ness | Contact this person
National Partnership for Women & Families

I commit to working with Clarence Braddock and others to help bring the patient and family voice into the education and training of health professionals.

I commit to reaching out to participants at this convening to expand efforts to engage patients, families, and consumer advocates in partnership with clinicians, administrators and other stakeholders to redesign care delivery in ways that make the care system more patient-and-family centered, while also improving clinical outcomes and lowering costs.

In my own organization, we will focus on bringing this work to scale and developing a sustainable business model for it.

Florence Harvey | Contact this person
CareBridgade

The CareBrigade Patient and Family Engagement System empowers Patients in interacting as engaged partners with their doctors, making informed choices in line with their own preferences, and, at the same time, engages friends and families (even at a distance), in providing emotional, spiritual, and practical support, including lay patient advocacy, for the Patient from the moment of diagnosis, thru extended treatments, surgeries, and during at-home recovery.

Marcus Thygeson | Contact this person
Blue Shield of California

I commit to taking the learnings from this convening and using them to update our patient and family engagement strategy.

Part of that strategy is hiring a leader to lead that program, so I also commit to getting that done in the next 12 months.

My last commitment is that I will work with Glyn Elwyn to operationalize routine measurement of the quality of decision processes in at least one pilot clinic and hopefully multiple clinics in California by the end of the year.

Michael Barry | Contact this person
Informed Medical Decisions Foundation

Sometimes there can be a dichotomy between what clinical practice guidelines tell a clinician to do and what an individual informed patient really wants. Involving patients as part of the guideline process can help ensure guidelines take into account not only the clinical evidence base, but also variations in how patients weigh the risks and benefits of different management options. I commit that our Foundation will work towards greater inclusion of patients in clinical guideline development, and will develop a measurable policy objective in that regard. 

Sean Eligon | Contact this person
nGage Health

We are committed to developing patient engagement systems that transform healthcare delivery from an episodic and reactive discipline to a proactive and ongoing dialogue between healthcare providers and the populations they serve.

Sherry Reynolds | Contact this person
Alliance4Health

The Alliance4Health will continue to use social media to spread patient centered design concepts to the health IT community

Susan Frampton | Contact this person
Planetree

Pat Mastors and I currently co-chair the National Quality Forum Patient and Family Engagement Action Team, and I commit to making sure that all of the learnings and discussion here will be integrated into the work of that team. Also, Planetree is one of those models that has been proven to work, and we work with hundreds of hospitals and long term care centers across the country and internationally, which is a wonderful opportunity to further drive patient and family engagement through that network—and I’m committed to doing that as well.

Preparing and training clinicians and healthcare leadership

Andrea Goldstein | Contact this person
Improving Healthcare for the Common Good

I teach a course in Health Care Management at a local college. I will absolutely incorporate the Roadmap into my syllabus this semester.

Betsy Gilbertson | Contact this person
Unite Here Health

I commit to trying to bring increased focus on patient engagement into our healthcare trust fund's relationships with providers. 

Beverly Lunsford | Contact this person
George Washington University School of Nursing

First, I commit to working with Jean Johnson, Shoshanna Sofaer, and Clarence Braddock in terms of nursing and medical education.

Also, I commit to trying to integrate patient and family engagement across the curriculum for geriatric education centers. The goal is not to teach patient and family engagement as a separate component but instead to integrate it across the curriculum. We must also try and translate this into toolkits to help teach patient and family engagement and person-centered care.

Clarence Braddock | Contact this person
University of California, Los Angeles

I commit to continuing the conversation about health professions education in those circles in which I find myself. A year from now, I think that one could have a national convening to look at how to drive health profession education around patient and family engagement, and I’m committed to partner with anyone in this room and anyone you know to start to plan and put on such a convening

Jean Johnson | Contact this person
George Washington University School of Nursing

I commit to working within and between health professions. There is a lot that needs to be done in nursing, and I’m committed to working with the major national nursing organizations to define and integrate a curriculum. I also commit to working with physicians and other health provider organizations to do so. It’s going to be something we need to do together.

Mary-Michael Brown | Contact this person
MedStar Health

I commit to informing nurse leaders about patient satisfaction and engagement.  

Ralph Gonzales | Contact this person
University of California, San Francisco

I commit to implementation of a system at University of California, San Francisco Health System to ensure that all staff has received training in patient and family engagement in the next 18 months.

Shoshanna Sofaer | Contact this person
Baruch College

I commit to working with Jean Johnson on the development of nursing curriculum around patient and family engagement and try to get into the leadership institute at the American Nurses Association. My big issue is to try to understand and share what we have learned about the involvement of non-experts in various kinds of boards of trustees and advisory groups. We have not learned from prior experiences, but there are a lot of lessons there. I commit to writing an article about that and also to moving to the development of a training curriculum around those issues that would speak to the needs of patients, families, and the staff who support them. 

Stephen Wilkins | Contact this person
Mind the Gap Academy

Mind the Gap Academy is committed to providing individual providers and provider organizations with the latest evidence, training, tools and solutions for advancing patient-centered communications and engagement between providers and patients.

Stephen Wilkins | Contact this person
Mind the Gap Academy

I am personally committed to advancing the focus on patient-centered care by providing education, skills assessments and training in patient-centered communication skills to clinicians, hospitals, health plans, Medical Groups and ACOs. In many cases our services are provided as a free service.

Wendy Nickel | Contact this person
American College of Physicians

The American College of Physicians is committed to the promotion of mutually beneficial partnerships among clinicians, patients and families that enhance quality, safety and the experience of care.

Facilitating dissemination and spread

Alan Glaseroff | Contact this person
Stanford University School of Medicine

I commit to spreading the message about patient and family engagement in all of the complex care and advanced medical home collaboratives where I serve as faculty.

Angela Coulter | Contact this person
Informed Medical Decisions Foundation/ University of Oxford

There is a healthy debate about patient and family engagement in many countries outside the U.S. and many interesting developments. I commit to doing my best to spread information about these developments and to encourage sharing of good ideas and innovative ways of working.

Beverley H. Johnson | Contact this person
Institute for Patient- and Family-Centered Care

The Institute for Patient- and Family-Centered Care (IPFCC) has two opportunities for which I can take back learning from this convening. First, IPFCC will launch an international campaign to forever change the concept of families as visitors. That campaign will be in hospitals first, and then across the healthcare system, and it’s called “Better Together: Partnering with Families.” The discussion regarding social norms will be helpful to this campaign.

Second, I’d love to think about how we can continue this conversation at The 6th International Conference on Patient and Family-Centered Care: Partnerships for Quality and Safety the first week in August and at future conferences. Some of you are already presenting and will already be there. I’d like to plan a session to continue the conversation and dialogue about the roadmap.

Charlotte Yeh | Contact this person
AARP Services, Inc.

I personally will always keep the patient and family voice at the table during any discussion of healthcare.

Katherine Browne | Contact this person
George Washington University

On behalf of Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q), I commit to several things. We’ve done work with seven of the 16 Alliances to quantify return on investment for consumer engagement. We have reports from AF4Q that I can share with this group.

Second, I commit to pulling together our experiences and developing recruitment and training materials for consumers and creating an onboarding package; pulling these together so that it is useful for broader dissemination.

Finally, I believe that you can’t scale charity or philanthropy, and we have been working with the Alliances on sustainability so this work builds in a self-sustaining engine. That work is still in the beginning phases, but I think that will be useful for us as we think about this as an ongoing movement because you can’t scale something that doesn’t have a financial return, and I commit to sharing any helpful information on that front. 

Shannon Brownlee | Contact this person
Lown Institute

First, I commit to working with anybody who is interested in social organizing—please get in touch with me.

Second, when we have our Lown Conference in 2015, which is a national meeting on overuse, I commit to including patients, community leaders, and religious leaders as we have done before. I also commit to including patient and community engagement as a programmatic aspect of that conference.

Sue Collier | Contact this person
American Hospital Association/Health Research Educational Trust

I commit to guiding the spread of patient and family engagement leading practices across the state of North Carolina through learning networks and meaningful partnerships with patients and families.

Ted Rooney | Contact this person
Maine Quality Counts/Maine Health Management Coalition

I commit to bringing what I learn at the Moore convening to the clinician and patient leadership that I work with in Maine.

I commit to being a connector of ideas in Maine and to help all of us in the field navigate the roadmap.

As I continue to advocate for the inclusion of patients and family members in the healthcare system, I commit to helping to find ways to help them be/become effective in improving the safety and quality of the care delivered by the organization(s) with which they work.

Measuring and researching patient and family engagement

Carol Mangione | Contact this person
University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine

I’m going to commit to helping Clarence Braddock identify articulate patients who have the “Ph.D. of the street” to help with curriculum development in patient engagement, and I’m going to use as my base, the 10 community partners in the Robert Wood Johnson clinical scholars program who have taught our post-docs how to do respectful partnered research.

I’m also going to commit to working with Lewis Sandy. I’ve done federally funded research with United Health for over 10 years, and I think we could think about ways to disseminate and test models at the health plan level to engage patients and providers at a level that hasn’t been the case so far. 

Finally, one of my biggest community partners is the Los Angeles Department of Health Services (DHS) led by Mitchell Katz, which takes care of a large number of safety net patients. I commit to working with Mitchell on funding new models of ambulatory care in DHS that would respect the patient voice more. 

David Kendrick | Contact this person
MyHealth Access Network

I commit to three things—the first of which I’ve already done, which was to leave my Silicon Valley career and go back to Oklahoma to do this kind of work.

As a focus on education, I offer our School of Community Medicine in Tulsa as a lab for ongoing research and innovation on the training side.

Also, with our health insurance exchange project, we’ve aggregated data, gathered when healthcare is delivered, on 2.6 million patients. For folks who want to do more in this area, I offer that both as a laboratory and an intervention.  

Glyn Elwyn | Contact this person
The Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science

My commitment is to continue the effort to develop effective measures to assess patient engagement.

Jill Yegian | Contact this person
Integrated Healthcare Association

At Integrated Healthcare Association, we are on the measuring/implementation side of healthcare. In the work that we do, I commit to pursuing the best available measures of patient experience and to exploring measures of patient engagement and patient-reported outcomes. There is a real opportunity in California for those working in measures to be a partner in the testing and implementation side of this work in the real world.

Altarum Institute

Altarum Institute, with support from Safeway Inc., developed a validated measure of consumer engagement – the Altarum Consumer Engagement (ACE) Measure™.  The Roadmap highlights how publically-available measures will play an important role in improving engagement. As such, we commit to offer the ACE Measure questions and scoring algorithm to providers, payers and researchers at no cost.

Karlin Schroeder | Contact this person
Parkinson's Disease Foundation

We hope to use the measurement and research portions of the roadmap to help us both strengthen old partnerships and build new ones between patients and researchers. We have a program called Parkinson's Advocates in Research www.pdf.org/pair that trains people with PD and their care partners to collaborate with research teams. They provide input into research priorities that are important to the communities, patient centered outcomes, study design and more.

Lewis Sandy | Contact this person
UnitedHealth Group

I commit to continuing to explore, and I offer the invitation to all of you to explore, whether innovative ideas could be tested and scaled up, from the perspective of where I sit at UnitedHealth Group—whether that’s as a payer, part of care delivery systems, where there are apps, or measurement approaches that could be spread. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to try things out and scale them up rapidly. I commit to any ideas you have.

Melinda Buntin | Contact this person
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine

With my researcher and economist hats on, I can commit to investigating arguments that patient and family engagement may not be possible due to reimbursement and policy issues. If you encounter someone who makes this argument, please let me know so that I can investigate whether it is true, or an excuse for the status quo. 

Ming Tai-Seale | Contact this person
Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute

In my hat as a researcher, I will frame and present my research in the framework of patient and family engagement and continue the work we are all doing together to make sure that patient voices and experiences are represented in an authentic way and backed by empirical, rigorously collected data to inform policy and practices.

I also commit to working with folks in training for public health; that’s another resource we need to tap into. They’re the next generation of patient advocates, of hospital administrators, medical group executives, and we need to start early and we have trainees who come to the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.

My third commitment is as a researcher in a large multi-specialty delivery group. We have been lucky to have a seat at the table when clinical care processes are being redesigned, and I commit to making sure the patient voice is there authentically, to make it real, and to build on work in various divisions. I want to share the joy of doing this kind of work.

Steve Shortell | Contact this person
University of California, Berkeley

I can commit to trying to expand the knowledge base around patient and family engagement-related issues through research, including partnership with the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). We have a center at Berkeley around organization and innovation research that’s centered on this topic to some extent.

I would also like to offer a suggestion that it might be good for some of the organizations that fund this work to have a funders’ conferences around what we’re learning and the developing knowledge base.

Also, it’s really important that all the commitments we’re making now, we get on the existing agendas of people who can create change in this county – the leadership of our hospitals, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the American Hospital Association, medical societies, and so forth. They have their meetings and issues, and we need to insinuate patient and family engagement into their strategic agendas.

Advancing research and practice through foundation funding

Amy Berman | Contact this person
John A. Hartford Foundation

The John A. Hartford Foundation, in partnership with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, is committed to advancing patient and family engagement. The Hartford Foundation has a number of activities that are already in the early stages focused on care redesign for vulnerable older adults and their families, development of patient-reported outcome measures, and building coalitions that partner consumers with geriatric experts in order to drive needed change. Other activities will come down the road, and they will reflect people—patients and families—engaged in healthcare redesign and implementation.

Richard Thomason | Contact this person
Blue Shield of California Foundation

I commit to thinking creatively and deeply about how to take everything I’ve been learning about patient and family engagement and figure out how to better translate that into moving this agenda with our grantees, who are primarily in the California safety net.

Susan Mende | Contact this person
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

I commit to working with Amy Berman and Dominick Frosch and the two respective Foundations to further work around patient and family engagement.