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Health Care Group Picks New Leader; Queram to Head Collaborative

Posted on: Thursday, 29 September 2005, 18:01 CDT

By GUY BOULTON

Christopher Queram who as chief executive of the Employer Health Care Alliance Cooperative in Madison has been at the vanguard of pushing hospitals to disclose information on quality will become executive director of the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality.

"His whole career has been around performance in health care," said John Toussaint, chief executive of ThedaCare, a hospital network in Appleton that belongs to the collaborative.

The group, which includes hospitals, physician groups, employers and labor unions, was formed several years ago to improve the quality of health care in Wisconsin. Its members in southeastern Wisconsin include Advanced Healthcare, Columbia St. Mary's, Froedtert & Community Health and the Medical College of Wisconsin.

The collaborative is working to develop accepted measures of health care quality for doctors and hospitals an effort still in its early stages.

"There's an opportunity to expand and build on that commitment and its scope," Queram said.

The group also is committed to disclosing quality information to the public. This year, it launched a Web site that lets consumers and employers compare member hospitals and large multi-specialty clinics on 45 measures of quality.

The Employer Health Care Alliance Cooperative, known as the Alliance, has pushed for such openness for years. And Queram, chief executive of the Alliance since 1993, has long contended that making quality information public will spur hospitals and doctors to provide better care.

"The whole subject of quality measurement and improvement has become a real strong passion of mine," he said.

The collaborative could be a vehicle for that passion.

"That's what they are all about public reporting and pushing their members to get better," said Greg Simmons, chief executive of MetaStar, which contracts with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to work with hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and home health agencies to improve health care quality.

Queram will bring to his new job the perspective of employers who pay for much of the health care for people under 65 as well as his experience on several national organizations involved in the so- called quality movement.

He is on the board of commissioners of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, the most widely recognized accreditation organization for hospitals and other health care organizations, and on the board of the National Quality Forum, which helps sets standards for measuring health care quality.

Queram also is on an Institute of Medicine committee on Medicare.

"He brings a level of vision and experience that we really need at this point," said Toussaint of ThedaCare, which has drawn national attention for its efforts to improve quality.

The collaborative, he said, hopes to build ties to national organizations involved in the effort to improve health care quality.

"Chris is the right guy to make all that happen," Toussaint said.

Copyright 2005, Journal Sentinel Inc. All rights reserved. (Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media.)

Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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