Formed in 1992, the Health Improvement Collaborative of Greater Cincinnati is an incubator for innovation to create a healthier community. We bring community stakeholders together in a neutral forum, enabling even competitors to become collaborators in creating sustainable health improvement initiatives. The Collaborative:

• Identifies critical health improvement opportunities
• Aligns diverse community stakeholders in a neutral forum around focused health needs
• Nurtures and supports self-sustaining initiatives to improve health
• Transfers established initiatives to community ownership

The Collaborative coordinates the following programs/projects and activities:

• Indicators of Healthy Communities Report – reporting via a periodic report (published every three years since 1997) of health indicators encompassing 14 counties throughout the Tristate. The report attempts to answer the question, “How healthy is our Tristate community?” and provides a “snapshot in time” of each county in the Tristate area to serve as a baseline measure for past and future data.
• Hospital Comparative Study – charting inpatient and outpatient health outcomes using a system for documenting charges, length of stay and mortality in Tristate hospitals and health systems.
• Cincinnati MD Resource Center – working with employers to recruit physicians to Cincinnati. In three years the Resource Center has helped to fill approximately 200 physician jobs and saved the community more than $4 million in recruiting and advertising fees. The Resource Center also coordinates the African American Recruitment Project, which works to increase recruitment of African American physicians and nurses to Cincinnati.
• Prevention of Low Birth Weight – stemming high rates of low birth weight babies among those at-risk.
• HealthBridge – a nonprofit subsidiary of the Collaborative, HealthBridge (the nation’s largest electronic health information exchange) is comprised of 22 area hospitals and represents over 90 percent of the community’s hospital sector activity. HealthBridge also connects thousands of physicians and staff, as well as nursing homes, independent labs, radiology centers and others within the health care community. Moreover, HealthBridge – with more than 800,000 medical professional logins per year – provides access to more than 60 hospital-based critical care systems. And, through its clinical messaging system (the largest community-based secure clinical messaging system in the country), HealthBridge delivers more than 2.1 million results to more than 4,000 physicians each month.
• Cincinnati Aligning Forces for Quality (CAF4Q) – a new, groundbreaking program, launched in early 2007, to improve care for those with chronic disease. This local effort is part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s three-year national program – involving 14 regional markets throughout the United States – to promote use of local market forces to improve chronic illness care.

In carrying out these activities, the Collaborative has focused on improving the health of two million citizens within the Greater Cincinnati region.

The Collaborative has been nationally recognized, on numerous occasions, for its unconventional approach to fostering community health and well being – most notably in 2002 as the recipient of the American Hospital Association’s Carolyn Boone Lewis Living the Vision Award; and in June 2007, when the United States Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) designated the Collaborative as a “Community Leader for Value-Driven Health Care.” With this status, the Collaborative joins a select group of regional health care coalitions across the country that is formally recognized by the HHS for pursuing forward-thinking health improvement strategies.