Health Care Excel

Health Care Excel (HCE), the Medicare Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) for Kentucky and Indiana, facilitates statewide meetings called Learning and Action Networks (LANs). LANs are structures by which large-scale improvement around specific health initiatives are fostered, studied, adapted, and rapidly spread. 

Learning and Action Networks create opportunities for communities to connect the knowledge, skills, and abilities of their peers and partners. This positive-energy, “all teach, all learn” approach to quality improvement allows providers and partners to share and apply the most efficient practices to improve health care quality.

All organizations and individuals dedicated to health care quality improvement are welcome and encouraged to participate in the Learning and Action Networks.

LANs “All Teach, All Learn” through

• Annual Learning and Action Network face-to-face meeting


• Regional face-to-face meetings


• Webinars


• Teleconferences


• Electronic newsletters


• Social media

 Benefits of participation

• Receive and share free information


• Connect with organizations and individuals with similar quality improvement goals and challenges


• Teach and learn from peers


• Gain access to research for data decision making


• Partner with high-performing providers


• Learn best practices as quickly as they are identified


• Participate in rapid, small tests of change (Plan Do Study Act cycles)


• Improve the care and health status of patients  

Health Care Excel maintains the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) operating values of “boundarilessness,” speed and agility, unconditional teamwork, valuing innovation, and customer focus.

Photographer Tim Valentino shared photographs from one of his charitable projects titled “A Touch of Pink” at Health Care Excel’s recent Learning and Action Network meeting. Tim has a fundraising calendar under development based on his photographic study and awareness exhibit of breast cancer patients and survivors.  A Touch of Pink is intended to raise awareness as well as funds for the Louisville chapter of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. For more information, go to www.valentinounlimited.com.

Health Care Excel’s LAN meeting in Plainfield, Indiana (left to right): Stacy Colson, Margie Banse, Tim Valentino, Tammy Geltmaker, and Don Gettinger.