Case Stories and Innovative Projects - Alaska
Alaska's Office of Rural Health, working through the SHIP program, encouraged small rural hospitals to form a network to 1) create economies of scale when purchasing goods and services, 2) create benchmarks on measures for performance improvement tailored to frontier facilities with low average daily census, and 3) train hospital personnel to maintain and improve the quality of patient services.
Eleven of the 18 SHIP eligible hospitals in Alaska (including all 8 Critical Access Hospitals) have joined the Alaska Small Hospital Performance Improvement Network (ASHPIN). As a network, these hospitals dedicated a portion of their SHIP funds to investigate the opportunities and costs of creating a wide range of connectivity between hospitals that would include telehealth and distance learning. The result was a business plan for teleradiology throughout the state for presentation to funders.
Leveraging SHIP funds in a performance improvement network resulted in ASHPIN receiving an additional $94,000 Network Development Planning Grant from HRSA's Office of Rural Health Policy in December 2003.
Contact: Randall Burns