Center for Health Care Quality

Urgent Matters, a national initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is dedicated to finding, developing and delivering strategies to improve patient flow and reduce emergency department (ED) crowding. Urgent Matters is a nationally recognized program and serves as a clearinghouse of best practices gathered from its research activities. Urgent Matters now collaborates with industry leaders to develop ED performance measures and share field-tested initiatives, and advises national and state organizations, health systems, and the federal government.

Urgent Matters began as a ten-hospital collaborative Learning Network that provided breakthrough research on patient flow measurement and improvement. As part of the Learning Network, hospitals implemented rigorous performance measures, assessed current processes, and used techniques of rapid cycle change to improve ED throughput and output. Key lessons from the first Learning Network can be found in Bursting at the Seams: Improving Patient Flow. Urgent Matters is now working with the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and Health Research and Educational Trust (HRET), an affiliate of the American Hospital Association, on Learning Network II to push this work to the next level.

The Center is the recipient of an AHRQ ACTION grant, which allows special status as an AHRQ grantee for quality improvement initiatives, with a focus on community health centers, safety-net hospitals, and emergency care. The Center is also supported by other grant funding from the AHRQ and the Department of Homeland Security.

Aligning Forces for Quality is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's signature effort to lift the overall quality of health care in targeted communities across America, reduce racial and ethnic disparities, and provide models for national reform. AF4Q asks the people who get care, give care and pay for care to work together toward common, fundamental objectives to lead to better care. The Center serves as the National Program Office for this initiative, targeted at improving health care in 17 communities that together cover 12.5% percent of the U.S. population, in the largest effort of its kind ever undertaken by a U.S. philanthropy.

The program focuses on three things: 1) engaging stakeholders to measure and publicly report on the quality of health care; 2) helping doctors, nurses and other health care professionals learn how to deliver better care; and 3) helping consumers and patients become more engaged in the quality of care they can demand and receive.

Each of the Aligning Forces communities has built its initiative around a core, multi-stakeholder leadership alliance working to advance the goals and activities of AF4Q at the local level. These alliances include participation from physicians, nurses, patients, consumers and consumer groups, purchasers, hospitals, health plans, safety net providers and others.

AF4Q works to promote hospital and community based quality improvement, public reporting, payment reform, patient engagement in their care. Initiatives of AF4Q use virtual and real-world collaboratives as a mechanism to improve throughput, reduce readmissions, reduce racial and ethnic disparities in care, and promote the use of interpreters for people with limited-English proficiency.

The AF4Q program is led by Robert Graham, M.D, a renowned advocate for policy studies in family medicine and primary care and visionary for the American Academy of Family Physicians.

Contact Us

Aligning Forces for Quality
2121 K St., NW, Suite 200
Center for Health Care Quality
Department of Health Policy
Milken Institute School of Public Health
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20006
Phone: (202) 994-8642
Fax: (202) 994-3500

info@forces4quailty.org

Director: Robert Graham, M.D.
Assistant Director and Chief Operating Officer: Katherine Browne, MBA MHA