Overview

Hope Street Group is a national nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to expanding economic opportunity for all Americans. Our approach is simple: bring new voices to the public policy process in innovative ways in order to develop solutions to pressing national problems.

 

Policy 2.0: Applying Web 2.0 Principles to Policy Development 

One of Hope Street Group’s innovations is our custom online platform. The Policy 2.0 web platform provides an engaging online workspace for reform-minded stakeholders. Using this virtual work environment, where barriers to participation are low, participants can engage in dynamic and meaningful conversations about reforms to local and national policy.

 

Using Open Innovation to Reinvent Primary Care

The promise of being healthy and having access to the best health care system in the world has historically been a fundamental part our national identity. Given the complexity of the issues combined with massive industry consolidation, there is an immediate need for innovative and unique solutions that increase primary care access in order to lower system-wide health care costs and improve quality.

 

With the Using Open Innovation to Reinvent Primary Care project we are focusing at the nexus of workforce, practice change, and payment reform to simultaneously address cost and quality issues. We are joining the expertise of our distinguished group of advisors with the perspective of a broad-based policy team of more than 60 participants, drawn from the ranks of health care practitioners, industry professionals, entrepreneurs, policy-makers and members of the academic and research community.

 

During the first phase of the project, our teams tackled a case study each week and evaluated complex, systemic barriers to providing quality, cost-effective primary care services. Over 300 discussion items were posted and more than 100 articles were cited. In the second phase of the project, we identified recommendation “pearls” that emerged as part of the online conversation. These ideas were then reviewed and refined by the group and included in a voting-based dialog that we called an “Idea Jam”. Participants were asked to vote up or down on the pearls based on:

 

• Innovation – the solution solves a significant problem in a creative or original manner.
• Cost-Effectiveness – the solution controls costs at the practice and system levels.
• Feasibility – the solution is practical and politically viable.

 

The top voted pearls were reviewed by a number of our advisors at an Advisor Working Dinner. Next, we took the ideas to Silicon Valley to review them with select venture capitalists at a high-powered Idea Breakfast. Currently, we are synthesizing the combined feedback and using it to grow our pearls into recommendations that are actionable, original and thus visible while continuing to build and leverage a brain trust of experts, entrepreneurs, and policy makers. These recommendations will soon form a white paper that Hope Street Group and our network will disseminate and promote with policy makers in Congress and the Administration, industry thought leaders, and the larger health care reform community.

 

On December 10th 2010, the white paper will be presented at a major policy event hosted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington D.C. The event will be attended by senior representatives of various health care and political audience groups and will also be distributed even more broadly via webcast.