Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York

In the policy realm, it can be difficult for health care consumers to share their experiences, concerns, and proposed solutions with State decision-makers.

New York residents are the ones who ultimately pay for the cost of our health care system and bear the burden of its inadequacies. However, it is often the case that the interests of providers, payers, and other organized stakeholders take precedence over the patient. To ensure that New Yorkers have a stronger role in how health care is delivered and how health policy is made, NYHealth issued a request for proposals, Patients as Partners. Through this initiative, NYHealth is supporting projects that amplify the voice of New Yorkers and rebalance the health care system so that patients have more influence over their health and health care. In 2018, NYHealth awarded Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York a grant to participate in this initiative.

Under this grant, Columbia University helped elicit and implement health care practice improvement ideas that came directly from New Yorkers themselves, allowing for a fuller range of people to be engaged in quality improvement efforts and demonstrating the creativity and power of patients’ input. In New York State, patient perceptions of health care quality consistently lag other regions in the United States, and patient engagement initiatives rarely allow the majority of patients to participate in improvement. Building on its work in piloting AHRQ CAHPS Patient Narrative Elicitation Protocol, Columbia University developed and disseminated a statewide survey to elicit New Yorkers’ ideas, allowing them to be an active participant in health care improvement and showcasing patient ideas to health care systems across the State. It also administered the survey to a cohort of patients who received outpatient care in NewYork-Presbyterian’s (NYP) ambulatory care network, and NYP selected the best patient ideas and used them as a starting point for quality improvement efforts.

The study’s findings were published in The Milbank Quarterly.

See a full list of Patients as Partners grantees.