Community Managers Membership

Rationale for PALc

PALc is designed to be a hub for self-supporting learning communities that are managed by nonprofit organizations and funded by memberships. As a manager, nonprofit advocacy organizations work with NMQF to define a disease-specific or other type of health index and define features. The manager also determines membership levels for that index, registrations, and ongoing communication.

The National Minority Quality Forum supports these learning communities by:

• Providing community managers with the technology for a basic disease-specific index with at least three-years of aggregated claims and other forms of data, searchable by at least geography (zip code, county, state, rural, congressional and state legislative districts), co-morbidities, and demographics (age, gender, race, and ethnicity)

• Providing technical support and maintaining a secure system

• Facilitating collaboration between learning communities across indices including hosting webinars, facilitating communications, and developing supportive materials and resources.

Index User Membership Types

Online Membership: Online annual memberships are approved by community managers for individual users. Benefits include an account to enable technology that  displays of aggregated claims data for patient prevalence and count related to a single index, and related features allowing cross-referencing searches and mapping by demographics, co-morbidities, and geographies.

General Membership: General annual memberships are for both individuals and organizational non-profit users.  Membership includes use of the technology platform for a disease-specific index and users are registered by a community manager for that index.  Features expand from the online membership benefits to also include analytics of cost and utilization aggregated data, and pre-aggregated data that community managers may add to the index.   General users may also be able to export, print, and create template reports of data queries.   General membership dues vary by community and organizational type/use.  Other benefits are membership in relevant patient learning communities, invitation to register (with a registration fee) NMQF’s annual health summit, access to the Magazine “Heart & Soul” online and print versions, opportunities to participate in research projects, and communication about index outcomes and updates.

Academic/Research Membership: Academic/Research memberships include general membership benefits and enhanced features to facilitate research and analysis for research professionals. Users can view statistical, geographic, demographic, and co-morbidities searches, and apply an advanced software tool that enables users to upload and query unique compatible pre-aggregated files they may possess, and leverage the index’s mapping technology.  Other membership benefits include a defined number of consultations with index@nmqf.org team members, and the potential to co-author and co-present with NMQF and community managers for select publications and forums.

Health Care Organizational & Corporate Partnerships: Please contact index@nmqf.org to inquire about the scope of projects and health topics which may be applicable.  For already listed indexes, contact the community manager listed on the communities page at www.mypalc.org.  The potential exists for indexes to built for thousands of conditions.  Partnerships may enhance research and health care analyses, education, quality improvement, health outcomes, clinical trial, value-based decision making, and public policy.

For More Information Go to www.mypalc.org and the “communities” drop down menu for specific indexes or email: index@nmqf.org