It’s hard to believe, but this year we will be celebrating HealthTeamWorks’ 25th anniversary – and there is so much to celebrate. It is because of the support from our partners, clients, friends, and collaborators that we have reached this milestone and are able to look to the future with hope and excitement.
We work within an increasingly dynamic and ever-changing healthcare environment, and our team, the programs we are involved in, and the practices we serve to impact improvement have changed. However, the core of our purpose has remained the same. We want to improve the health of all people, teams, infrastructure, businesses, and organizations. And as our work has progressed, providing us with experiences and opportunities to reflect, our vision and values have grown and developed.
Today we exist to collaboratively transform healthcare through performance improvement, organization development, and training resulting in a strengthened community and culturally responsive high-quality care. We continue this work with the vision of achieving health, equity, and resilience.
This significant milestone is an opportunity to reflect on the visionary thought leaders who launched the organization and those who have contributed to its mission. The HealthTeamWorks of today remains full of passion and eager to build on what began a quarter of a century ago.
25 Years of HealthTeamWorks…
In 1996, the Colorado Clinical Guidelines Collaborative (CCGC) was launched to address the multiple and often conflicting clinical guidelines issued by health plans, medical societies, and government and private agencies in order to develop consensus to support one guideline per condition – a immense undertaking under any terms.
However, recognizing that knowledge is only as good as the systems we use to put it into action, the organization’s focus moved beyond guidelines to include transforming healthcare delivery. As a result, CCGC’s mission, vision, organizational structure, and business model shifted. Ultimately, this led to the transition in name from CCGC to HealthTeamWorks in 2011. Since then, HealthTeamWorks has been working with stakeholders across the healthcare industry to collaboratively transform healthcare through performance improvement, organization development, and training, with the goal of fostering value-based, culturally responsive, and high-quality care.
Marjie Harbrecht, MD
Founder and Previous CEO of HealthTeamWorksIt is humbling to see the number of practices and other healthcare institutions CCGC/HealthTeamWorks has influenced and supported over the years to redesign how healthcare is delivered and paid for, both in Colorado and nationally. Healthcare is complex and takes ongoing collaboration and a culture of continuous quality improvement to ensure patients receive the care they need, particularly in challenging times like COVID-19. With a truly dedicated staff and board, HealthTeamWorks has empowered many practices to provide excellent patient-centered care and succeed in value-based programs, and is uniquely situated to continue to support practices well into the future. Happy 25th Anniversary and congratulations on your amazing progress!
Fast-forward to 2020... HealthTeamWorks launched an updated strategic plan, informed by what we aspire to for our world, individual healthcare, the workforce, clinical, public health, and community organizations. We set our intentions toward a vision of Health, Equity, and Resilience focusing both within and outside of practice walls. While we continue to focus on the achievement of practice transformation, our work has again expanded bridging clinical, public health, and community-based systems as well as actively partnering with grassroots and grasstops organizations to address gaps in health and transformative alignment.
Through these efforts, we have achieved substantial impact:
Looking back, we are proud of these achievements and forever grateful for the supporters and partners that made them possible. But we are not done. In the years ahead, we aspire to build a stronger workforce and continue to foster whole person culturally responsive care in a collaborative, sustainable, and thriving model of care.
Explore the following links if you would like to learn more about how HealthTeamWorks is working to transform our nation’s health and healthcare,
We would also be thrilled to connect further with our supporters and partners, and if you would like to learn more, collaborate, or simply reconnect, please email us at solutions@healthteamworks.org.
What We Hear from Our Partners and Friends
Congratulations to HealthTeamWorks on its 25th Anniversary! From its roots in creating clinical collaboration across Colorado health plans, HealthTeamWorks has been a leader in advancing new paradigms in health care delivery, from the early pay for performance programs, to practice transformation, to value based care and risk readiness practice work. The value HealthTeamWorks brings to practices, care teams, integrated systems of care and, most importantly, to the patient is measured in improved care and positive experience. It has been my honor to have been a part of their incredible journey- from HealthTeamWorks's beginning to their future in creating resilient, equitable and vibrant health care. Thank you!
Elizabeth Kraft, MD
Board Chair of HealthTeamWorks
It is so exciting to see HealthTeamWorks celebrating 25 years of making a difference. I have had the privilege of knowing HealthTeamWorks since the organization started as Colorado Clinical Guidelines Collaborative (CCGC) as a community member, a former staff member and former board member. The success of HealthTeamWorks goes back to a foundational culture created by Marjie Harbrecht and Allyson Gottsman focused on innovation, transformation and excellence grounded in drive to create an equitable, person-centered, high-performing health care delivery system. The beginning is highlighted with the development of clinical guidelines developed in collaboration with the community to support the delivery of safe, effective, evidence based care. Fast forward to 2021, HealthTeamWorks has created an ecosystem of expertise in Care Delivery Transformation, Primary Care, APMs, Communities, Public Health to name a few. It is gratifying to see the organization always be at the forefront of what is needed for Health Care. Kudos to HealthTeamWorks for all you have accomplished. Wishing you many more years of doing the right work.
Julie Schilz
Director, Health Program Improvement
Mathematica
I am thrilled to congratulate HealthTeamWorks on its 25th anniversary! Since back in the day, HealthTeamWorks has excelled as an organizational thought-leader, innovator, and advocate at the front lines of care. HealthTeamWorks’ “true north” commitment has always been advancing strong primary care through best practice-powered, team-based and accessible systems of care designed to meet patients where they are at.
From practice coaching and performance improvement to Primary Care First and now Allyship Development, HealthTeamWorks is just what healthcare needs. Hats off to its exceptional leadership team and expert staff.
David Ehrenberger, MD
Previous CMO and Board Chair of HealthTeamWorks
It is so rewarding to see how HealthTeamWorks, originally Colorado Clinical Guidelines Collaborative, has continued for twenty-five years to evolve their early-adopter, thought-leader position using a collaborative approach in the ever-changing landscape of health and healthcare. From leaders in promoting the use of evidence-based clinical guidelines (1996) to early adopters of practice facilitation and Wagner’s Chronic Care Model (2006) to one of the first in the country to pilot the Patient-Centered Medical Home (2009), to founding members of the Colorado Health Extension System (2012), and now leaders in promoting health equity.
Allyson Gottsman
Practice Innovation Program at CU
Colorado Health Extension System (CHES)
Department of Family Medicine
School of Medicine – Anschutz Medical Campus
With the coming of HealthTeamWorks' 25th anniversary, this seems to be an appropriate time to reflect on both our history as well as our future. HealthTeamWorks began as the Colorado Clinical Guidelines Collaborative (CCGC), an organization that was created to develop and approve clinical guidelines for use in Colorado’s primary care practices. We quickly realized that it wasn’t enough to simply make these guidelines available to the Primary Care Providers in our state, we had to meet with these providers and their staff to figure out what processes and systems were needed to consistently and effectively implement these guidelines and then teach other practices how to do this.
Based on these experiences CCGC began to develop a more comprehensive view of its' role in enabling primary care practices to accomplish what was then referred to as the triple aim, improving the experience of care, improving health outcomes and reducing healthcare costs. As the scope of CCGC’s role in the transformation of primary care practices evolved its’ name changed to HealthTeamWorks and its’ reach expanded from working with Colorado primary care practices to working with practices throughout the country.
While our mission will remain largely unchanged, as we begin this next quarter century, HealthTeamWorks will continue to challenge itself and its’ participating practices to make major contributions to the evolution of Primary Care in this country. We plan to explore new ways to better integrate technology as well as other health related stakeholders, like public health departments and community based social service organizations with primary care in order to enable these practices to work more efficiently and effectively. We will continue to work with primary care practices to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities and to reduce avoidable healthcare costs by finding ways to more effectively address the social and behavioral determinants of health. In doing this critically important work, as it has in the past, HealthTeamWorks will continue to be nationally recognized for its’ innovation and leadership.
David Brody, MD
Board Member of HealthTeamWorks
During my 5 years at HealthTeamWorks, I had the honor of facilitating training for Quality Improvement professionals. HealthTeamWorks quickly embraced best practices in learning and development, which led to extensive improvements in participant's facilitation skills and competencies. Many consultants, practice managers and providers still tell me about the impact of their HealthTeamWorks training experience on their professional development and career advancement.
Jaclyn King
Previous Practice Facilitator & Learning and Development Facilitator at HealthTeamWorks
HealthTeamWorks was originally organized as Colorado Clinical Guidelines Collaborative (CCGC) in order to promote consistent recognition of evidence-based treatment guidelines for many chronic illnesses by hospitals, physicians, other providers and payers. It was very successful and attracted national attention. The first directors were Paul A. Nutting, M.D., Donna Marshall, Donald Daeke, M.D., David S. Herr, M.D., Jenae Ernst, Diana Maier, Stan Kerstein, M.D., and Kathleen Music.
In 2010, in recognition of the shift of focus that had occurred under the leadership of Marjie Harbrecht, M.D., Executive Director, and Cissy Kraft, M.D., long-time board member and past and present Board President, from the narrower scope of clinical guidelines to the much broader mission we found ourselves performing, the beginning of what we are today, we decided a new name was in order. The staff, directors, and others were asked to submit suggestions. A member of the staff not only suggested the name HealthTeamWorks, which was unanimously adopted, but submitted a drawing the became the logo we use today. HealthTeamWorks has a long history of the most important changes in the organization coming from inside through staff ideas.
As we pursue our mission of collaboratively transform healthcare through performance improvement, organization development, and training resulting in a strengthened community and culturally responsive high-quality care, we look forward to the changes that we know are coming but perhaps cannot yet clearly see, that will continue to transform HealthTeamWorks and its dedicated staff to allow it to continue its contribution to the transformation of healthcare in the most positive ways.
Douglas D. Foote
Board Member of HealthTeamWorks
HealthTeamWorks HQ
14143 Denver West Parkway, Suite 100
Golden, CO 80401
Phone: 303.446.7200
Email: solutions@healthteamworks.org
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1111 E. Army Post Road, Suite 2004
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