We have updated the Rural Wisconsin Chronic Disease Toolkit to include resources for diabetes, blood pressure, self-measured blood pressure monitoring resources, and other chronic disease management resources that have been tested and used by our members that are a part of the Rural Wisconsin Health Cooperative Primary Care Improvement Project. With the new updates you have the ability to print off specific checklists, diagrams, and other tools right from the Table of Contents.

For more information on downloading the toolkit go to www.Hipxchange.org or contact Cheryl DeVault, Primary Care Program Manager.

The Rural Wisconsin Chronic Disease Toolkit was developed as part of the Rural Wisconsin Health Cooperative (RWHC) Primary Care Improvement Project, which is a HRSA Network Development Grant-funded collaboration between RWHC, participating RWHC member hospitals, the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ), and other partner organizations.

The RWHC Primary Care Improvement Project’s overarching goal is to develop and implement a network approach to improving quality associated with diabetes and hypertensive disease care in rural primary care settings. The project’s initial focus is to reduce the percentage of the participant population’s diabetic patients with Hemoglobin A1C Poor Control (National Quality Forum measure 0059), and to increase the percentage of the population’s hypertensive patients with adequately controlled blood pressure (NQF 0018). These quality measure improvements are eventually expected to lead to reduced costs through decreased target population ED visits and inpatient admissions. The Toolkit has been developed by WCHQ and RWHC in order to provide project participants with an up-to-date compendium of several rurally relevant best practices that have been shown to be effective in improving chronic disease outcomes. Depending on various factors—differences in size, demographics, internal processes, etc.—healthcare organizations may find some tools more useful than others. We intend to update this toolkit over time with additional resources as they become available.