About DMAA Advocacy
Our Strategic Vision: Advocate population health improvement as a tool to improve the quality of health care and health care outcomes, and reduce preventable health care costs.
Policymakers know DMAA: The Care Continuum Alliance as the voice of chronic disease prevention and care and turn to DMAA member leaders and staff for the information and resources they need to guide the decisionmaking process. Through its Government Affairs Committee, DMAA answers that call with expertise that contributes to the process, while always protecting the interests of its members.
The Committee, open to all association members, works to support state and federal legislative initiatives that promote evidence-based population health improvement. At the federal level, DMAA responds to emerging legislative proposals and regulatory policies of potential consequence to its members and other stakeholders. DMAA also works with state lawmakers and regulatory officials, educating them on the effectiveness of population health improvement and its benefits to Medicaid and other populations.
DMAA Health Care Reform Principles
In December 2008, as a new administration, Congress and the nation prepared for action on health care system reform, DMAA delivered an emphatic statement for population health improvement with its Principles for Health Care Reform. The document calls for population-based reform initiatives that make quality improvement and efficiency paramount and that move the health care system's focus from reactionary care to promotion of health as a "shared national resource."
DMAA advocates delivered the promising message of population health throughout 2008:
- DMAA outreach to federal policymakers contributed to a Congressional Budget Office conclusion that population health can produce positive clinical outcomes and cost savings and contribute to reform.
- DMAA, Partnership for Prevention, American College of Preventive Medicine and U.S. Workplace Wellness Alliance hosted a Capitol Hill briefing on the importance of investing in worksite health promotion.
- Two DMAA member leaders won appointments to state advisory panels on chronic disease care, in New Jersey and Tennessee.
- The Healthcare Financial Management Association included substantive comment by DMAA on health care payment reform in a June white paper.
- A Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease guide to successful prevention and disease management programs references the DMAA definition for Advancing the Population Health Improvement Model and discusses at length the model and its application to chronic disease care.
- DMAA, in coalition with other leading health organizations, publicly supported congressional sponsors of a bipartisan "sense of the House" resolution for an increased federal commitment to prevention and public health.
