NJHA Receives Planning Grant from RWJF for Regional Market Quali...( PRINCETON N.J. July 23 -- The Ne...),Health

PRINCETON, N.J., July 23 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The New Jersey Hospital Association's Institute for Quality and Patient Safety has received a planning grant for $199,502 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to develop a proposal for improving the quality of healthcare in New Jersey.

The grant will help determine over the next six months whether New Jersey can be represented in RWJF's Aligning Forces for Quality initiative, which is focused on lifting the overall quality of healthcare in targeted communities, reducing racial and ethnic disparities, and providing models of national healthcare reform for other parts of the country. The Foundation launched the Aligning Forces initiative last month. Materials about the Aligning Forces initiative can be found at http://www.rwjf.org.

NJHA's Institute for Quality and Patient Safety will be the leadership organization for this project. NJHA's Aline Homes, senior vice president of clinical affairs, will serve as project director, and Peter A. Gross, MD, senior vice president and chief medical officer for Hackensack University Medical Center, will act as project co-director.

"This is an excellent opportunity for us to participate in a project that could have an enormous positive effect on the quality of healthcare delivered to patients. There will be a number of key players involved in this initiative including the Department of Health and Senior Services, the Department of Banking and Insurance, The Rutgers Center for State Health Policy, The Medical Society of New Jersey and The New Jersey State Nurses Association," stated Holmes.

This group will meet on a regular basis for the next six months to develop a statewide plan for quality improvement that will be submitted to RWJF in December.

Based in Princeton, NJHA has been providing its 108 members with advocacy, information, research and education since 1918.