What is Better Health Greater Cleveland and Who are Our Partners?

Better Health Greater Cleveland is an unparalleled alliance of regional stakeholders committed to improving the health and quality of care for Greater Cleveland’s residents with common chronic medical conditions. The Better Health alliance is one of 14 nationwide in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Aligning Forces for Quality initiative. Its strategy is to align multiple stakeholders and resources that influence health care quality in regions throughout the United States.

The Better Health alliance officially began in February, 2007. Its founding partners are The MetroHealth System, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grantee, The Center for Community Solutions, and Health Action Council. Numerous other partners include public health agencies, professional associations, health plans, employers, hospitals and physicians. Our partners and the people who represent them are volunteers – people dedicated to better health for their patients, their employees and our community.

Better Health Greater Cleveland leverages this remarkable regional cooperation and the electronic medical records capabilities of the region’s health systems to measure and report on outpatient care across all payer sources and socioeconomic groups for several important conditions. Our first Community Health Checkup was published in June, 2008 and identified favorable results in comparison to national data for health plans throughout the U.S., but it also identified gaps in our achievement as well as disparities in health outcomes among those with fewer resources in Greater Cleveland. We have since re-committed to improving our care and outcomes and to eliminating these disparities. We recently endorsed the following Mission:


As in our first Community Health Checkup, this second report features care and outcomes for adult patients with diabetes. Much of our work to date has focused on care managed in primary care settings. In recent months, we have launched quality improvement initiatives for selected aspects of hospital care. There, we focus our efforts on insinuating widely accepted evidence-based quality benchmarks into real-time practice while patients are in the hospital, and on improving their transition back to the community.

Our strategies are multifaceted and integrated. In outpatient care, we:
1. Measure and publicly report achievement of physician groups using nationally endorsed indicators of high quality care;
2. Target opportunities for consumer education to spur patient activation and foster patient-physician partnerships, and
3. Offer coordinated region-wide quality improvement education for health professionals.

In hospital care, our initial focus is on stroke care. We are seeking opportunities to use best care practices as health care providers interact with their patients and their patients’ electronic record. Second, we address gaps in information and care that too often occur when patients leave the hospital by identifying best practices that our hospital partners can adapt to their needs. We hope to use our successes in stroke care as a model for hospitalized patients with other chronic conditions.

A list of our committed partners (including primary care practices representing 47 sites and more than 500 physicians, health organizations and consumers, hospitals, employers and health plans) may be found here.