My wife and I used to sit at Greenlake and rate dogs walking by on a 0-10 scale. This rating was purely based on aesthetics although we did consider context in that dogs were rated more favorably if they looked more like their humans. We called this dogging but neither of us had grown up around dogs and had no real dog experience until we adopted our pandemic puppy, Callie – a poodle-schnauzer mix who is very protective of our girls and very fond of trying to catch the neighborhood squirrels and rabbits (and rats but we don’t talk about rats).

Now, of course, I couldn’t imagine someone distilling the whole of Callie into a single number. I suppose these owners at Greenlake thought the same. So how can we possibly measure a person with a number? A person’s health? A population’s health? At our joint FHCQ/Alliance webinar last year we asked these same questions and will have the opportunity to expand on that and see how our community is adopting or not common measures of health this July 21^st.

Following our format of Federal, state, and local boots on the ground, we will open Tamyra Garcia, MPH, Deputy Director, Quality Measurement and Value-Based Incentives, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Broadly we want to identify how providers, purchasers, and health plans can more efficiently achieve shared aims of high-quality health care through aligning quality measures. We will then focus on our state Common Measure Set and how these measures have been used to drive improvement in Health Care Authority Contracting. As always, we like to end with a boots on the ground panel – featuring Dr. Edwin Carmack with Confluence Health, Dr. Angie Sparks with UnitedHealth, and Dayna Weatherly, RN, with Proliance. I have found the act of listening and reacting to the words and thoughts of those from other sectors to be so valuable in thinking about consequences of any one sector’s actions.

Of course I’d like to add in a debate on the merits of greyhounds versus chihuahuas (I especially love arbitrarily strong opinions), and hope you will join us on July 21^st at 10am. Register here for the third webinar in our Change in Action webinar series on July 21 from 10-11:30am – Aligning Quality Measurement: Measuring What Matters