In another sign of the University of Utah Health Care’s commitment to transparency and knowledge sharing, Value University opened its virtual doors to health care professionals nationwide Nov. 11.
A free online learning platform, Value University is designed to provide ways for improving the value of health care, giving patients better-quality care and service for lower costs.
ValueU, as it’s being called, includes a national training pilot with a publicly accessible training curriculum, which the University of Utah says takes one hour to complete for continuing education credit. The pilot involves 10 health care organizations that will learn and share ways to create high-value health care. The program, developed with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will use University of Utah processes.
“Classically, health care providers are not trained in any of the competencies around what improving value actually is and means,” said Robert Pendleton, M.D., chief medical quality officer at University of Utah Health Care, in a news release. “We’re sharing what we’ve learned about what centering health care around patients truly means in an efficient package that people can access at their convenience.”
“For me, it is the shared learning that makes this so exciting,” Pendleton says. “No one center has all the answers, but we’re gaining insights from different places to make things better.”
University of Utah Hospitals and Clinics was one of the first hospital systems to publicize patient reviews on its own website, in a quest to become “radically transparent,” said Quinn McKenna, chief operating officer of the Salt Lake City system, in an interview earlier this year.
Value University can be found at http://healthsciences.utah.edu/value-university.
