Dr. Mark Williams, chief quality and transformation officer at UK HealthCare and director of the University of Kentucky Center for Health Services Research, and Dr. Jing Li, associate director of the UK Center for Health Services Research, will present findings from Project ACHIEVE at the National Care Transitions Awareness (NCTA) Day Summit being held on NCTA Day, April 16. National Care Transitions Awareness Day aims to increase awareness of the critical transition that patients and their caregivers experience when they transition from the hospital to home or other site of care.

In honor of the awareness day, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is hosting the summit as an opportunity for CMS to actively listen to key transitional care stakeholders and act upon their input in order to ease this transition and improve patient outcomes. Through this summit, CMS has invited transitional care leaders and stakeholders from across the country to discuss best practices and recommendations regarding innovative and evidence-based strategies. Over 1,100 people have registered to attend the event in Baltimore or online.

Project ACHIEVE is a five-year $15 million study funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI)* and led by Williams in order to comprehensively analyze: what matters most to patients and family caregivers during care transitions; and rigorously evaluate which transitional care strategies and combinations of strategies employed by hospitals are most effective at improving patient-centered outcomes. The project is currently analyzing data from approximately 8,000 patients and 42 hospitals across the country in order to inform recommendations to hospitals and health systems regarding their transitional care efforts. 

Preliminary findings from this study have received widespread attention, including publication in The Washington Post (https://wapo.st/2P0zCUF). One-page summaries of preliminary study findings are available here: https://achieve.med.uky.edu .

For more information about the National Care Transitions Awareness Day Summit, please visit https://bit.ly/2UqnWAJ.

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) is an independent, nonprofit organization authorized by Congress in 2010. Its mission is to fund research that will provide patients, their caregivers, and clinicians with the evidence-based information needed to make better-informed healthcare decisions. PCORI is committed to continually seeking input from a broad range of stakeholders to guide its work.