Building the scaffold to improve health care quality in Western New York

Many health policy leaders are promoting the community as a place to try out new ideas for improving the quality of health care. Alliances with multiple stakeholders are moving forward with communitywide efforts to improve the quality of care without the benefit of an established evidence base or guiding framework. This article presents a profile of one community's attempt to facilitate and coordinate quality improvement in its geographic area. The P2 Collaborative of Western New York is one of sixteen sites supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's national Aligning Forces for Quality initiative. The strategy and vision of the collaborative has evolved as it has tried to capitalize on opportunities and overcome barriers in its work. The article concludes with a discussion of eight tasks that community alliances may consider undertaking when establishing an infrastructure for improving the quality of health care, such as convening area stakeholders to develop a strategy and finding ways to monitor health outcomes at the local level on an ongoing basis.