Michigan Academic Consortium: Nurse Managed Primary Care

Funding Source: W.K. Kellogg Foundation

Project Period: October 1, 1999 - September 30, 2003

Project Coordinator: Lynn Breer, PhD

The primary purpose of the Michigan Academic Consortium (MAC) was to assess the educational and clinical components of the program developed by the four university nursing consortium. The evaluation examined the effectiveness of the curriculum for nurse practitioners across the university as well as identified and evaluated common clinical outcomes across all the university based nurse managed primary care centers. The evaluation also included exploring the consortium process and the collaboration effort among the four universities. The process and collaboration piece consisted of a narrative explaining the development and maintenance of the consortium as well as the dynamics of the consortium. MPHI-CDMTR provided technical assistance to the evaluation efforts of this project, which included technical assistance in data collection, management, and integration. MPHI-CDMTR consulted on data systems, customizations, and problems; consulted on data quality assurance protocols and procedures; served as a site for collection and integration of data outputs; and designed and implemented a report generation facility. MPHI-CDMTR worked with the data managers at each of the universities as data was collected and entered and conducted cross-site data analysis and reporting as well as served as a convener for the Evaluation Task Force. The Evaluation Task Force assisted the sites in developing a consistent design for the project evaluation and specified a core data set to be collected at all sites. Each site contributed data to the project evaluation database maintained by MPHI-CDMTR.

For the past eight years, MPHI has worked with the Michigan Academic Consortium: Nurse Managed Primary Care (MAC) project. MAC is a collaborative effort among four schools of nursing in Michigan and MPHI for the purposes of advancing and sustaining nurse managed health centers across the state. MPHI-CDMTR's role in the evaluation involved co-chairing evaluation task force meetings, developing and implementing an evaluation plan to determine the effectiveness of all project activities, tracking all evaluation efforts, identifying and/or developing appropriate tools to collect data across the four schools of nursing and the nine nurse managed health centers, ensuring data were collected in a standardized format at the appropriate time, receiving and tracking all data, and cleaning, verifying, managing, analyzing, and reporting data. Findings were used to inform policy makers and funders at the state and national level. This work resulted in several peer-reviewed publications as well as additional funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Project Type: Evaluation, Research, Data Management