Dallas Fort Worth Hospital Council Education and Research Foundation

Health value initiative/data management - management of healthcare information to improve quality, safety, community health, population health and promote best practice Research to providers and the public.

Various projects to assess and meet needs of hospitals and the general public as an effort to affect patient safety and quality

Community health programs - program #1 - Hospital quality improvement contract (hqic) - work at the regional, state, national or Hospital system level to sustain and accelerate national progress and momentum towards continued harm reduction in the medicare program, help identify solutions already working and disseminate them to other hospitals and providers. Program #2: pre-diabetes referral program to encourage health care clinics to refer patients with an a1c pre-diabetic range to cdc-approved lifestyle change or diabetes prevention programs. With automated referrals in the emr, volumes of referred patients have improved. We provide support to help structure queries in the emr and to automate the referral path. Quarterly data are collected and reported in aggregate to the tx department of state health services, whose funding is provided by the cdc. Program #3 - mental health first aid grant, through the tx department of state health services community mental health grant. The program leverages local mental health authorities across north Texas to fund mental health first aid training for rural counties, the lgbtq+ and veteran populations and their families across north Texas, and healthcare workers serving those communities across north Texas. Since the inception of the program, we have trained more than 15,000 lay persons to watch for the signs of mental and behavioral health challenges and direct participants to community based resources.

The dfw Hospital Council Foundation's workforce center provides a forum for collaboration of healthcare workforce issues with more than 80 dallas-fort Worth hospitals and their nursing and human resources executives, and close to 20 north Texas colleges and universities and other community-based partners. We participate in two grants with Dallas college focused on healthcare apprenticeships with department of labor and on biotech with the economic development administration to improve the quality and number of healthcare workers in the region and to serve as an advocate for workforce issues that affect hospitals, such as workplace violence and nursing shortages.