Posted by Sarah Myers on March 16, 2015
[Editor's note: This update was shared by engagement team member Elizabeth Monti Sullivan]
Having the opportunity to represent ImproveCareNow at the recent Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center IBD Education Day gave me a firsthand view of the challenges and opportunities associated with communicating about our Network. While my ImproveCareNow Engagement and Leadership campaign team partners and I had a plan for our time at the information fair, we learned that you can never come too prepared to tell the story of this dynamic community!
We learned that building awareness and pitching involvement in ImproveCareNow to potential partners can be challenging at first, even for those of us who know a lot about the Network. And if we struggle with telling the ICN story, it must be even more challenging for our colleagues in the Network's 70+ care centers. How well can they explain ICN and its objectives? Are we sending a clear and consistent message? And why can it be so tricky to give a clear picture of ICN?
We know that ImproveCareNow is an intricate web of people, activities, and platforms. We are staff & leaders, volunteers, families, patients, sponsors, partners, clinicians, and researchers. We are many people working on many projects. You might find us talking about social media platforms and forums, quality improvement, awareness campaigns, research studies, work groups, goals and metrics, and many other things. With all of this constant activity taking place, how can we be sure we are effectively articulating who we are in ways that resonate with all of our partners?
Here is where I like to start: What we know is that ImproveCareNow centers have together increased the remission rate for registered kids with IBD from 55% to nearly 80% without using new medications. Their success is rooted in the application of quality improvement methodologies, seamless sharing of lessons learned, and a relentless focus on data that tell the story of the patients’ disease course. We know that we want to elevate and even more closely incorporate patient and family voices into the process of improving care. We are bringing together many people who focus on many different things, but all our activities share one common goal: we want to continue to be the cure for waiting for the cure. We want to outsmart IBD together!
We have heard the voices of parents and patients who see the value of collaborative improvement and are pushing us further, faster as we pursue this goal together.
Tell us what ICN means to you and how you want to be involved.
ICN Engagement Campaign
Recently, ImproveCareNow has been training participating care centers to develop and empower leaders at the center level. With this training, ImproveCareNow will have an opportunity to deepen its impact and extend its reach by focusing on equipping the whole community with the skills, knowledge and tools they need to take ownership of ImproveCareNow’s work at the local level. We are happy to announce that the first round of centers have almost completed a five-module training series and that we are about to begin rolling out training to the next group of centers!