The 17 "beacon communities" designated by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology are intended to outfit consumers and providers alike with the tools to help transform healthcare delivery at the community level.

"The basic premise is that there is no one particular thing that if implemented at a community level would produce effective, sustainable quality cost improvements," Aaron McKethan, ONC's Beacon Community Program director, says in an interview with CMIO.

"One of the critical features of the Beacon program is the belief that producing consistent performance measures at the community level--cost, quality and population of health--can be helpful at the local level to help physicians know on an ongoing basis if their interventions are working and how they might be changed as they go forward," McKethan explains while discussing what he calls "Beaconology."

"Achieving quality improvement locally is an iterative process."

Each beacon community is now setting baselines for measuring performance data and will be tracking various performance measures on a quarterly basis, then reporting that data to ONC over the three-year life of the program. "We're going to release the measures each community is collecting or reporting on in a month or so, once they're finalized, and that will be an open, transparent process," McKethan says.

He would like to see other communities not funded by ONC follow the lead of the federally designated beacon communities by taking similar measures to improve the quality and efficiency of care. "We are prepared for other communities to receive benefits from the program even if we don't expand from the formal program," McKethan says.

For more about "Beaconology":
- check out this CMIO story

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