Welcome to WRGH

Wye River Group on Healthcare (WRGH) and its affiliated Foundation for American Health Care Leadership^sm (FAHCL) are nonpartisan, not for profit entities, which serve as catalysts to raise awareness and broaden perspectives to enable constructive healthcare change.

What's New

WRGH is creating an international knowledge transfer platform, showcasing emerging better practices in health and healthcare among industrialized nations.

• Please click here for an overview of this project.

Wye River Group on Healthcare, Premier healthcare alliance launch best practices Web site to improve delivery and finance of healthcare in communities nationwide.

The site, www.leadinghealthycommunities.com, is a national repository of effective community efforts to improve health.

• Click here for more information on how to become a strategic partner and add your success story to the library!

10 Questions for Political Candidates

The questions below represent the best thinking of more than three hundred executives from across the spectrum of healthcare, including the physician, hospital, pharmacy and pharmaceutical, insurance, employer, government, advocacy, public policy, allied professionals and consumer sectors.

We ask that you, as a candidate for public office, consider these questions as a framework for public policy development and execution. While there are no simple answers to these complex ideas, they represent the core issues our nation, our state and our communities face in responsibly meeting the health and healthcare needs of our citizens.

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WRGH has been asked by the AIDS Action Foundation to help them develop and execute a national strategy to re-invigorate the debate here in America, and lay down a challenge to end the epidemic of HIV/AIDS in ten years.

HIV/AIDS has killed more than 20 million people world wide since 1981. Here in our country, more than 40 thousand new infections are reported every year and roughly 1.2 million Americans live with this disease today.

To accomplish our objective to end this epidemic, we need to better understand how the socio-political, scientific, and clinical environments surrounding HIV/AIDS have changed, and what the facts are today. We will need to work with key opinion leaders to develop creative strategies to reawaken the public, broaden perspectives, and engage public policy makers, with a goal of definitive action.

• Click here for additional information.

The Employers' Guide to Healthcare Consumerism

WRGH announces publication of the Employers' Guide to Healthcare Consumerism, which describes the market evolution in the 5 years since our 2001 Employers' Guide to Patient-Directed Healthcare. This Guide frames the promise of healthcare consumerism, which represents a true sea change in how all stakeholders view and participate in American healthcare, while being realistic about its challenges. Each chapter provides a perspective on different key elements for an effective transition and explores the roles and reactions of payers, providers, and consumers.

• Click here for intro
• Click here for PDF of the Guide

A 21st Century Model of Care: Optimizing Use of Underutilized Services

In creating a better healthcare future for our country and its residents, there is a compelling need to re-evaluate the roles of all health professionals and consider new models of service delivery. Current trends, including our aging population more prone to chronic disease, healthcare workforce shortages, rising costs, and public demand suggest that cost-effective, high quality alternatives are needed.

The opportunity is ripe for professionals with diverse health backgrounds to join forces and work across disciplines collaboratively to advance areas of common interest in public policy and in the marketplace. A 21st Century Model of Care: Optimizing Use of Underutilized Services is a multi-faceted initiative to develop and advance new models of care that will better address growing demands.

• For the project overview, click here.

An Environmental Scan of State and Local Healthcare Reform Efforts

The healthcare reform landscape has been fertile since the late 1980s with local, regional, and state-based programs emerging to address cost, quality, and access. These programs have met with varying levels of success. Now is an excellent time to survey such efforts with an eye toward what might be relevant on a national scale in the coming years.

As background for "America's Health Care Leadership Talks," a baseline scan has been completed which captures a number of healthcare reform concepts which have been developed and tested at the state and local level. The scan includes a brief description of each initiative, its mission, the players involved, strengths and weaknesses, and progress to date. It also highlights common critical success factors that relate to their replicability and scalability to the national stage. We believe a better understanding of experience to date can inform the health policy debate by providing insight into what is likely to be viable and what should be avoided.

• Click here for the scan.

(WRGH is grateful to G. Abraham Dabela, who performed the Environmental Scan in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Public, Drexel University School of Public Health, Philadelphia, PA.)