The New England Public Health and Managed Care Collaborative (NEPHMCC) brought together state and public health departments from the six New England states with several health plans from around the region to achieve population-based advances in health. Founded in 1998, NEPHMCC, was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and reached the end of its grant period on April 30, 2004. Although NEPHMCC no longer exists, ARC believes that it is important to continue to make available to the public some of the important resources developed by the organization. One of the important areas of NEPHMCC's work was improving management of pediatric asthma and often worked in partnership with the Asthma Regional Council on shared areas of interest. We have posted a number of documents and tools (see left menu) that NEPHMCC developed for public use. We hope that you find them useful.

A Message from the Executive Director, April 30, 2004

To the many people who have worked with NEPHMCC over the last several years:

As you may know, the Collaborative has come to the end of its Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant period on April 30, 2004. I am very grateful to the RWJF for the generous funding of the Collaborative and their support of our work. I would also like to thank you for your participation and support of the Collaborative. While it is sad to reach the end of our funding period, many important things have come from our work. Over the past two years, some of the exciting work has included:

• Perhaps most importantly, having the opportunity to bring health plans, public health departments, quality organizations, and others from across the region together to work collaboratively on health improvement issues -- the original reason why the Collaborative was founded, which has remained so important over the Collaborative's years.

• The collaborative development of a provider toolkit on effective use of pediatric asthma medication. The full report and state specific reports are posted can be viewed by clicking here.

• The evaluation of the Asthma Action Plan initiative, which provided very interesting information about the extent that the AAP has been implemented, barriers to its implementation and ideas for improvement. The full report and state specific reports are posted can be viewed by clicking here.

• Our joint work with the Asthma Regional Council on work related to environmental interventions for asthma and surveillance.

• Our collaboration with Vermont Program for Quality in Health, the U.S. Department of Healthy and Human Services Region 1 Office, and many other organizations on the sponsorship of the conference "Realigning Health Care Payment Policies and Incentives for High Quality Diabetes Care" and follow-up work that has come from that. 

• Our conference last summer "Creating a Framework for Setting Genetic Testing Policy," which was an exciting opportunity to bring payers, public health, and providers together in a forum on this topic.

These are just some of the things that we have worked on over the years and we appreciate everyone's work on these and other projects. After April 30, the Asthma Regional Council has generously agreed to post some of our key asthma work on their website.

I would like to thank all of you for having the opportunity to work with you, for your contributions to the Collaborative's projects and the Steering Committee, and for all that I have learned from working with you. I hope that one of the Collaborative's legacies will be the relationships that have been built by working together over the last several years.

Sincerely,

Amy Rosenstein

Executive Director

New England Public Health and Managed Care Collaborative