Ohio Colleges of Medicine Regional Quality Improvement Hub (QI Hub) Project

Sponsored by the Ohio Department of Medicaid (ODM) and administered by the Ohio Colleges of Medicine Government Resource Center (GRC) in partnership with faculty and staff from Ohio’s Colleges of Medicine (including Case Western Reserve University/Northeast Ohio Medical University, Ohio University, The Ohio State University, University of Cincinnati, and University of Toledo), the Quality Improvement (QI) Hub project seeks to support ODM’s Managed Care Population Health and Quality Strategy by promoting the health of the Medicaid population and supporting healthcare delivery systems to improve performance, demonstrate value, and to reduce health disparities.  

Each of the Colleges of Medicine (CoM) serves as a Regional QI Hub and works directly with the GRC team, external QI leaders, representatives from ODM, and Ohio’s Managed Care Organizations (MCOs) to establish sustainable QI infrastructures that can be leveraged to identify, implement, and spread QI projects at the regional level to impact population health and improve health outcomes.  

In year one (2023), leadership teams at each CoM Regional QI Hub developed infrastructure to support the implementation of QI activities, including the establishment of patient and family advisory groups, and outreach to community organizations for additional support.  In year two (2024), Regional QI Hubs each engaged at least 10 practices to implement QI activities focused on the areas of hypertension and diabetes. In sum, a total of 77 spoke sites participated. In year three (2025), Regional QI Hubs each engaged 10 more practice sites and 72 additional sites joined the project with a continued focus on the areas of hypertension and diabetes.

Looking ahead, Regional QI Hubs will leverage learned best practices to support robust and widespread implementation of QI activities with a goal to disseminate to additional sites in future years, reaching approximately 60% or more of the target population in the region within a 5-year period.