{"id":597,"date":"2025-03-31T20:26:02","date_gmt":"2025-03-31T20:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thenicholsonfoundation.org\/blog\/?p=597"},"modified":"2025-03-31T20:29:09","modified_gmt":"2025-03-31T20:29:09","slug":"finding-and-nurturing-effective-partnerships-the-new-jersey-health-care-quality-institute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenicholsonfoundation.org\/blog\/finding-and-nurturing-effective-partnerships-the-new-jersey-health-care-quality-institute\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding and Nurturing Effective Partnerships: The New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For 20 years, The Nicholson Foundation worked to advance meaningful change in safety net service systems in New Jersey. Its grantmaking journey is described in Changing Systems, Changing Lives<\/em>: Reflecting on 20 Years.<\/p>\n

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\tThrough stories and related text, the book showed how a small family foundation could take six guiding themes and put them into action through grants and partner support. In the process, the Foundation spurred real systems change that benefitted individuals, families, and communities.<\/p>\n

\tA recent scholarly paper built on that work, helping to make the Foundation\u2019s approach broadly accessible to researchers, academics, and philanthropists. \u201cA Framework for Creating Systems Change,\u201d by Drs. William Brown and Wynn Rosser and published in The Foundation Review<\/em>, presents a new model for systems change. Five of the model\u2019s seven components reflect themes in Changing Systems, Changing Lives<\/em>. The sixth component slightly shifts the emphasis of the Foundation\u2019s \u201cEngaging with Government\u201d theme, and the seventh highlights the Foundation\u2019s overall approach by including performance measurement as a distinct and separate component of the model.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"Performance<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

A Long-Term Partnership for Systems Change<\/h2>\n

Brown and Rosser note that collective action is foundational to initiatives that result in effective system impacts and that \u201ccollaboration and relationships are central components of systems change.\u201d Describing the \u201cNurturing Partnerships\u201d component of their model, they also highlight the importance of infrastructure systems to support partnership activities.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how the Foundation\u2019s work exemplified this aspect of Brown and Rosser\u2019s systems change model:<\/strong> During its early years, the Foundation focused on social services, such as education. Over time, however, staff realized that the Foundation couldn\u2019t make progress in these areas without equal attention to healthcare, because health was intertwined with so many other factors, such as poverty, homelessness, and educational barriers, that affected the well-being of vulnerable populations.<\/p>\n

The more we learned about healthcare issues in New Jersey, the more we recognized we needed a like-minded partner to help us think strategically about our grantmaking in this area. We found that partner in the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute<\/a><\/strong>. Founded in 1997, the Quality Institute is a nonprofit policy and analysis organization focused on improving the safety, quality, and affordability of healthcare.<\/p>\n

For more than 10 years, the Foundation and the Quality Institute worked closely together, forging a strong partnership to promote a more effective Medicaid program in New Jersey. One of the most significant projects\u2014jointly planned and carried out\u2014was the development of Medicaid 2.0: Blueprint for the Future<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Begun in March 2016, this initiative aimed to create a blueprint that New Jersey could use to redesign and modernize its Medicaid program. Such a plan had the potential to improve the lives and health of hundreds of thousands of people enrolled in the program.<\/p>\n

The initiative involved several phases:<\/p>\n