ABSTRACT
One of the most important national initiatives to target settings that care for large proportions of disadvantaged populations is the Health Disparities Collaboratives sponsored by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). These collaboratives comprise community health centers that are brought together to learn and disseminate qualityimprovement techniques developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. At least one controlled pre-intervention and post-intervention study of community health centers, participating in quality-improvement collaboratives, demonstrated considerably greater improvement than the external and internal control centers in the composite measures of quality for the care of patients with asthma (Bashir 2002).
