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Mission: The Healthy Memphis Common Table is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization whose mission is to support and encourage people working together to improve the health of everyone in our Mid-South community.
 
HealthyMemphis.org is a web service of The Healthy Memphis Common Table that helps you take charge of your own health. You will also find information to help citizens, health care providers, and other Community Partner organizations work together to improve everyone’s health.
 
The Healthy Memphis Common Table works to improve both health and health care in the Mid-South, an area about 150 miles surrounding Memphis. We bring businesses, governments, schools, health care providers, media, fitness centers, faith-based and other organizations around a “common table” to address community health problems that no one organization can overcome alone.

Get Involved!

Click here to join the Healthy Memphis Common Table as a Community Partner!

Our first Healthy Memphis Common Table initiative focuses on reversing the increase in obesity and diabetes by 2008.
 
Our second initiative "Aligning Market Forces for Quality:  The Regional Market Project" is being conducted in cooperation with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and many Memphis-area Community Partners. Memphis is one of 14 pilot communities in the U.S. working to engage consumers, providers and payers to improve quality through public reporting of performance on key measures of outpatient quality of care.  Our goals include dramatic improvement of the quality of care for chronic diseases in ambulatory settings. We also hope to educate consumers about the critical components of high quality care so they can seek high quality health care for themselves and better take control of their health. For more information, visit: http://www.forces4quality.org/

    "Memphis Quality Initiative" (http://www.memphisquality.org) is our third initiative. MQI is a collaboration of Memphis-area hospitals' administrators, physicians, nurses, and pharmacists -- partnering, developing, and implementing citywide, noncompetitive quality improvement initiatives. MQI recently became tied to the Healthy Memphis Common Table.  The Common Table collaborates closely with QSource, a valuable Community Partner, in this effort.

The goal of MQI is to be catalyst, a resource, and a capacity-builder for health care quality improvement in the Mid-South.  By working together, member hospitals strive to provide the right care to every patient, every time. Our goals?:

• Pursuing perfection by providing care that is Safe, Timely, Effective, Efficient, Equitable, and Patient-Centered (STEEEP)
• Encouraging patient-centered customized care while discouraging unwarranted variation
• Improving care by sharing quality initiatives among medical and administrative professionals.

Activity as a U.S. Health & Human Services designated Chartered Value Exchange is our newest initiative.With this initiative, we strive to find ways to help buyers of health care find the best value for their health care dollar. Information is the key! We are working to develop easy-to-use and understand systems to provide fair, accurate, and useful quality data along with price information. We want consumers, referring physicians and buyers of care to have the same kind of tools (price and service features) that people have grown to expect when they buy other types of services.

With our CVE designation, we will have access to additional information such as Medicare data to ensure that our quality information is more complete. Memphis health care leaders working on this project will also have access to HHS experts and new tools.

The Healthy Memphis Common Table has also been invited to be a convener for the Mid-South community to compete to become an EHR demonstration site. This new demonstration initiative uses Medicare waiver authority to reward the delivery of high-quality care supported by the adoption and use of electronic health records (EHR). The goal is to foster the implementation and adoption of EHRs and health information technology (HIT) more broadly as effective ways to improve the quality of care provided. Ultimately electronic records will help transform the way medicine is practiced and delivered. HIT also has the potential to provide significant savings to the Medicare program and improve the quality of care for Medicare beneficiaries. This demonstration is designed to leverage the combined forces of private and public payers to drive physician practices to widespread adoption and use of EHRs.