I love New Year’s. I love almost everything about it – the parties, the sequins, the midnight toast (and possibly kiss). But I particularly love the reflection that comes with a fresh year – taking stock of where we’ve been and where we want to go. I am borderline obsessive about creating a handful of personal goals to focus on in the upcoming year and evaluating how I met the goals I set in the previous year.
The Kentuckiana Health Collaborative, like most organizations, also has yearly goals and priorities, but we often don’t truly celebrate and reflect on our accomplishments like we should. We want to remedy that, and to that end, we have released in this new year our first-ever KHC annual report, looking back on the historic 2018 that we had as an organization and setting the tone for 2019.
Last year was a big one for the KHC, and it marked the beginning of many changes for our organization, so it was the perfect time for our first annual report. We hired new staff, partnered with the Kentucky Department for Medicaid Services to create a core set of healthcare measures, redesigned our Employer and Healthcare purchaser network, and said goodbye to our longtime chair, Dr. Ken Wilson, who retired from the KHC board in December.
Dr. Wilson was kind enough to write an opening letter for the annual report, one that truly reflects on where we’ve been as an organization and as a community, but also looks forward with hope towards the future of the KHC and the community.
In 2018, the KHC re-organized its work into four focus areas:
- Healthcare Quality Measurement and Transparency
- Employer and Healthcare Purchaser Network
- Community Health Improvement
- Events and Communication
This reorganization didn’t change the work that the KHC does or pursues, but rather allows us to better strategically plan and more clearly articulate our work. This accompanied a website facelift that created “hubs” for each of these categories, so our KHC members and individuals in the community can easily find the projects and events that interest them.
The KHC Annual Report followed this style, and the heart of the report is divided up into accomplishments made in each of these areas. The volume of accomplishments the KHC had this year, while not sacrificing quality, was astounding. Some of the biggest projects highlighted in the report were:
- Creating the Kentucky Core Healthcare Measures Set
- Developing a primary care guide to improving the early identification and intervention of individuals with risky and unhealthy substance use behaviors
- Partnering with a student-led alliance of passionate students to improve youth mental health
- Hosting the fourth KHC annual conference
Click on the image above to read the full report.
But my favorite part of the Annual Report is probably “A Year in Numbers,” a beautiful at-a-glimpse description of the KHC’s accomplishments. The KHC produced the entire report in-house, from the content generation to the design, and KHC staff member Natalie Middaugh’s design of this page was beautiful and informative.
Take a few minutes to read through the KHC Annual Report. Current KHC member organizations will receive physical copies with their membership renewal packets that will be mailed in the near future. On our website, we have an online version that includes live links that you can click on to find out more about each project mentioned in the report.
We certainly accomplished a lot as an organization in 2018, and we’ve set more ambitious goals for 2019. Here’s to the new year!
