Projects & Programs
Through the Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF) and our operating arms—the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative (PRHI), Health Careers Futures (HCF), and the Women’s Health Activist Movement Global (WHAMglobal)—we create an army of partners, change agents, and quality improvement leaders; and turn our region into a lab for testing new models of care, new public health initiatives, and new collaboratives to improve coordination and manage population health.
We are a grantmaking organization, providing more than $120 million, since our inception, to others striving to improve health and health care in our region.
We are also a grantee, garnering myriad federal, state, and foundation grants which allow our staff to support the work of healthcare practitioners and providers. With our leadership and guidance, healthcare providers demonstrate how critical quality improvements can make enormous differences in the lives of patients and in the cost of providing care.
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AIDS Free Pittsburgh
AIDS Free Pittsburgh (AFP) is a public health initiative to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Allegheny County. AFP is financially supported by the Allegheny Health Network and UPMC with support from the Allegheny County Health Department and managed by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation. It is comprised of government agencies, healthcare institutions, and community-based organizations that strive to support and improve care for people living with HIV/AIDS and those at risk for acquiring HIV. The AIDS Free Pittsburgh initiative was officially launched on December 1, 2015 following similar efforts in San Francisco, New York State and Washington State. Allegheny County was the second county in the United States to take on this challenge. For more information, visit aidsfreepittsburgh.org -
BH Fellows
BH Fellows is an educational loan repayment and training program for new and existing workers within the behavioral health system in Allegheny County. The BH Fellows program offers competitive pay, educational loan repayment (up to $25,000 for a bachelor’s degree or up to $45,000 for a master’s degree), and a two-year cohort experience including a retreat, professional and leadership development, and relationship building experiences. In exchange, Fellows commit to work for a minimum of two years with a sponsoring behavioral health service provider in our region. BH Fellows is a program of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, and JHF is a primary partner in recruiting fellows and delivering the cohort experience. People who are new to the behavioral health field are encouraged to apply. For more information, visit bhfellows.jhf.org/apply. -
Centers of Excellence Learning Network
The Opioid Use Disorder Center of Excellence (COE) Technical Assistance Project provides technical assistance to the Commonwealth’s COEs. The University of Pittsburgh, School of Pharmacy, Program Evaluation and Research Unit (PERU) provides technical assistance, learning networks, and curriculum that is specific to the needs of each COE, and PRHI facilitates the learning networks in partnership with PERU. The COEs ensure effective care coordination, integrate physical and behavioral health needs for every patient with an Opioid Use Disorder (OUD), and increase access to Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT). -
Champions Programs
JHF has demonstrated the important role that leaders or champions play in conceiving, testing, and sustaining quality improvement in health care; and develops and funds an annual program aimed at elevating the skills, knowledge and quality improvement experiences of those committed to the highest level of patient quality. Past Champions programs have included Physician Champions, Nurse Navigator, Pharmacy Agents for Change, EMS Champions, Medical Assistant/Licensed Practical Nurse Champions, and Community Health Worker Champions, and a Community Health Worker Apprenticeship program.
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Closure
Closure is an initiative to change expectations for end-of-life. The goal for Closure is to empower consumers and healthcare professionals with easy-to-access, simple-to-understand information and resources to make informed decisions about end-of-life.
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Community HealthChoices Education
Since 2015, JHF has convened community partners and stakeholders for education and training meetings focused on Community HealthChoices—a program to deliver long-term services and supports to seniors, individuals with disabilities, and people who are Medicaid eligible or dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. The goal of the program is to improve service coordination and strengthen eligible consumers’ options for receiving community-based care. Community HealthChoices officially rolled out in southwestern Pennsylvania at the beginning of 2018, and has been implemented in other regions of the Commonwealth. -
Death and Dying Series for Healthcare Professionals
The Death & Dying Series for Healthcare Professionals takes on a key challenge: the reality that professionals are not well prepared to deal with or talk about death, dying, and grieving families. This education series, modeled after the popular Death and Dying Fellowship for graduate students, provides healthcare professionals with an opportunity to learn, confront, and discuss the legal, medical, social, cultural, familial, and spiritual aspects of death and dying within a multi-disciplinary group in a low-pressure environment. Join us to gain the skills you need to have meaningful end-of-life conversations with your patients and their families.
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Dementia Friendly Pennsylvania
Dementia Friendly Pennsylvania is a collaborative effort with Dementia Friends Pennsylvania, a program of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, existing dementia-friendly Pennsylvania communities, and supported by the Pennsylvania Department of Aging. More than 400,000 people in Pennsylvania are living with dementia. For every person diagnosed with dementia there are at least three to four people, which may include family, friends, and colleagues, whose lives are profoundly affected. This initiative works to ensure communities across the state are equipped to support people living with dementia and their care partners. For more information, visit: dementiafriendlypa.org
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Dementia Friends Pennsylvania
In May of 2018, JHF became the state administrator for the Dementia Friends Pennsylvania initiative. JHF seeks to educate communities across the commonwealth about dementia, break down stigma surrounding dementia, and encourage individuals to implement practical changes to best support people living with dementia. Through a train-the-trainer model, Dementia Friends Champion Volunteers are equipped to offer in-person Dementia Friends sessions to community members. Dementia Friends Pennsylvania is part of Dementia Friends USA, a global movement that is changing the way people think, act, and talk about dementia. For more information, visit: www.dementiafriendspa.org
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Feinstein Fellowships
Through the Jewish Healthcare Foundation's annual Feinstein Fellowships, graduate students and professionals work in a collaborative, multi-disciplinary learning environment to acquire new skills that aren’t part of traditional healthcare graduate programs. The Feinstein Fellowships aim to inspire the next generation of healthcare leaders and activists.
The Patient Safety Fellowship focuses on quality and safety in healthcare settings and provides participants the opportunity to apply learnings in a real-world healthcare setting.
The Salk Health Activist Fellowship focuses on changing practice, policy, and perspectives around a health issue.
The Death and Dying Fellowship explores the medical, legal, social, cultural-familial, and spiritual components of end-of-life care, using JHF's Closure model.
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HealthChoices Patient-Centered Medical Home Learning Network
The HealthChoices Physical Health Managed Care Organizations (MCOs) are working with Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative (PRHI) and the Health Federation of Philadelphia (HFP) to facilitate the HealthChoices Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) Learning Network—one of the provider requirements for this PCMH Program. PRHI is coordinating the PCMH Learning Network across Pennsylvania, and facilitating the quarterly, regional learning collaborative sessions for the Southwest/Northwest and Northeast regions. HFP is facilitating the quarterly, regional learning collaborative sessions for Lehigh/Capital and Southeast. The goals of the PCMH Learning Network are to support the PCMH providers and Physical Health MCOs in achieving the shared PCMH aims, identifying and acting on improvement strategies in response to opportunities for improvement toward the common PCMH aims and measures, and developing an internal capacity to continuously learn, adapt, and improve. -
HIV/AIDS Fiscal Agency
JHF has been the fiscal agent for HIV/AIDS funding in southwestern Pennsylvania since 1992. In this capacity, the Foundation manages funds from multiple government funding sources, providing oversight, monitoring, data reporting, quality management, technical assistance, and funding to the AIDS Service Organization (ASO) grantees under its agency. These ASOs facilitate the delivery of healthcare, supportive, and housing services to eligible individuals living with HIV, and prevention/education services to at-risk populations.
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Internship Program
Graduate students who are passionate about innovations in healthcare delivery, policy, and patient safety can pursue their interests through paid summer internship opportunities with the Jewish Healthcare Foundation and its supporting organizations. Internships are available during the school year as well, although the program is less formal.
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Maternal and Child Health Grants Program
JHF is operating as the fiscal agent for Coronavirus State Fiscal Recovery Funds provided through the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services to address maternal health needs. Over $9 million is available to improve maternal health outcomes across Pennsylvania through a variety of initiatives. Two short-term grant opportunities are currently open for proposals from Pennsylvania-based organizations: innovative maternal care projects and healthy food access programming for low-income pregnant people. -
Minority AIDS Initiative (MAI)
The Minority AIDS Initiative (MAI) is funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Health to engage HIV-positive individuals who have been lost-to-care. Approximately 15% of individuals with HIV in the Commonwealth are struggling with HIV adherence which can have serious consequences for them or their partners. JHF is working with community partners across the state to link individuals to care and supportive services, subsequently reducing community viral load.
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National Patient Safety Board (NPSB)
In partnership with a national coalition, JHF and PRHI are advancing a National Patient Safety Board (NPSB) modeled in-part on the well-established and successful National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST). The NPSB would support existing agencies in monitoring and anticipating adverse events with artificial intelligence, conduct studies, create recommendations and solutions to prevent medical error, and leverage existing systems to bring key learnings into practice. The NPSB would guarantee a data-driven, scalable approach to preventing and reducing patient safety events in healthcare settings—and will save lives. For more information, visit npsb.org. -
PA Long-Term Care Learning Network
The PA Long-Term Care Learning Network launched in 2022 in collaboration with the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services (DHS) and several managed care organization partners to advance and support the DHS strategic quality incentive program for nursing facilities. The statewide learning network brings timely and reliable education to the leadership and frontline in nursing facilities across PA and offers a series of webinars addressing 11 core components of strategic quality incentive program. JHF staffs an operations committee to support the program and an education committee to identify best practice models for nursing homes. -
PA Youth Advocacy Network
JHF has developed a PA Youth Advocacy Network to bring together youth and youth organizations to share resources, collaborate on a shared policy agenda, and effectively advocate for change. Representatives from 26 different high schools and over ten community partners have been involved in the network. The Network kicked off in 2018 with a Youth Advocacy Summit, and has continued with regular calls, advocacy campaigns, legislative visits, and advocacy workshops. -
Patient Safety Technology Challenge
The Patient Safety Technology Challenge fuels the engagement of students and innovators in creating solutions and envisioning transformational approaches to reduce preventable deaths and disabilities from medical errors and harmful events and reimagine a vastly safer healthcare system. The initiative injects patient safety awards into existing local, regional, and national competitions to help increase awareness of the patient safety crisis. Funds to set up awards are available to existing competitions, ideathons, hackathons and start-up weekends as either an off-the-shelf award package that could be incorporated into their programs or to support a new award under a pre-existing program. For more information, visit patientsafetytech.com. -
Pennsylvania Perinatal Quality Collaborative
The Pennsylvania Perinatal Quality Collaborative (PA PQC) was launched in April 2019, with funding from the Pennsylvania Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs and the Henry L. Hillman Foundation as an action arm of the Maternal Mortality Review Committee (MMRC). 58 birth sites and NICUs and 14 health plans across the Commonwealth are actively identifying perinatal processes that need to be improved and quickly adopting best practices to achieve common aims. The focus areas include maternal opioid use disorder, neonatal abstinence syndrome, contraceptive care, maternal depression, and severe hypertension. For more information, visit papqc.org -
Pennsylvania Teaching Nursing Home Collaborative
The Pennsylvania Teaching Nursing Home Collaborative (PA TNHC) is a three-year program funded by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation’s Health Careers Futures, The John A. Hartford Foundation, the Independence Foundation, and the Henry L. Hillman Foundation. The Collaborative is an extension of the “Revisiting the Teaching Nursing Home” pilot project (2021-2023) which established partnerships between three schools of nursing and four nursing homes across Pennsylvania to enrich student experiences through clinical rotations in nursing homes and to support the implementation of the Age-Friendly Health Systems 4Ms framework. Building on this work, the PA Teaching Nursing Home Collaborative will scale across the state to all nursing homes and schools of nursing who have a shared commitment to improving clinical outcomes for nursing home residents, enriching nursing education, and supporting the careforce. By joining the Collaborative, nursing homes and schools will work to strengthen their partnerships, improve nursing students’ exposures to nursing homes, and support nursing home staff in implementing the 4Ms. -
Pittsburgh: A Safer Childbirth City
Pittsburgh: A Safer Childbirth City aims to transform the city into a safer, more equitable and accessible place to give birth. Through support from the Heinz Endowments and Merck for Mothers, WHAMglobal has established the WHAMglobal Community Fund for maternal health service providers to ensure that services are coordinated and meeting the needs of all moms and babies. The Community Fund brings together funding organizations committed to maternal health from across our region, and distribute funds to support small safety-net organizations providing maternal health services across the pregnancy and birth continuum. The Fund supports networks and collaboration among grassroots organizations delivering maternal health services in priority communities in order to improve access and availability of high-quality services, reduce health disparities, and improve maternal health. The Fund has also established a learning collaborative for participating organizations to provide a forum for collaboration and training (including technical assistance) on topics, such as quality improvement, marketing, communications, and strategic planning. -
Pittsburgh Regional Autonomous Patient Safety (RAPS) Initiative
The Regional Autonomous Patient Safety (RAPS) Initiative will build on the Pittsburgh region’s exceptional resources, such as AI and robotics leadership; the breadth and depth of health sciences research and education at the region’s universities; and the regional entrepreneurship and business community to spur an innovation ecosystem and economy for healthcare safety. Learn more. -
Primary Care Practice Transformation
PRHI has developed a comprehensive, customizable curriculum that integrates electronic health record meaningful use standards with Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) standards and incorporates practical, real-life examples of how to implement and optimize patient-centered workflows for NCQA PCMH certification. PRHI also provides coaching and project management support for PCMH recognition applications.
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Quality Improvement Training and Coaching
PRHI provides training in our flagship quality improvement methodology, Perfecting Patient Care℠ (PPC), which is based on Lean concepts and Toyota Production System's industrial engineering techniques. It is offered in a variety of formats for executives, managers, and frontline workers.
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Teen Mental Health Collaborative
JHF manages a Teen Mental Health Collaborative of Allegheny County community-based organizations that serve teens. In 2020, JHF initiated the Collaborative to facilitate opportunities for youth-serving organizations to share their approaches to providing emotional support, connection, and engagement for teens and to learn from one another.
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Up Next for Patient Safety Podcast
The Up Next for Patient Safety podcast series launched in conjunction with the campaign to establish a National Patient Safety Board, and it engages in conversations with experts in health care and technology to examine the best paths to guaranteeing patient safety. Hear about different solutions to existing problems that are possible right now. We have the capacity during the “once in a century” pandemic to gain the attention and support of a nation to address those current and ongoing errors and adverse events that cause unnecessary illness, death and long-term disability. Join host Karen Wolk Feinstein, president & CEO of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation and the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative, as she untangles the components of safer care for us all. Listen here. -
Women's Health Inequity in Older Age
Women face many biases based on gender stereotypes, and these have an even greater effect on their health as they age. JHF is developing a strategic workplan and initial set of activities to address the clinical, societal, policy, and financial inequities older women experience in health care. JHF's network of health and aging partners from philanthropy, health care and public health, the public sector and academia will help document the extent of the problem, build a coalition of local organizations, and provide a strategic framework for groups to work together and coordinate efforts. JHF is researching the current state and identifying best practice models for reducing women's health inequity in the US and internationally.
See a list of completed or historical projects and programs here.