What is a Consumer Engagement Associate (CEA)?

The Consumer Engagement Associate (CEA) is responsible to implement and further develop the consumer engagement work plan associated with the P² Collaborative of Western New York’s Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Aligning Forces for Quality initiative. The CEA will lay the foundation in their assigned community to engage consumers using a community wide approach. The work will be done collaboratively with numerous community partners. The goal: to build and support an individual’s own capacity to manage their health and health care.

The consumer engagement associate is responsible for developing strategies that will arrive at the desired outcomes. A successful consumer engagement strategy will motivate consumers to:

• Understand their risk or actual condition and how their behavioral choices can determine personal health status and take action.
• Understand they are partners in their healthcare and get involved.
• Understand doctors and patients both have responsibilities and obligations in achieving healthcare outcomes.
• Understand that there are guidelines based on expert opinion that they and their doctors can use together to govern their care and they have a right to expect their physicians to use these guidelines with them.

The CEA will build and sustain momentum around consumer engagement and is a part of the P² Collaborative planning team. Membership on this team will ensure the consumer engagement strategy is woven into the strategies for the other components of the AF4Q initiative.

Scope of Work:

1. Serves as the consumer engagement point person for the P² Collaborative in the assigned community and participates in community-based activities and on coalitions, helps coordinate community-wide efforts and participates in the Collaborative’s quarterly meeting.
2. Participate in P²'s consumer engagement associate learning community.
3. Conducts a local asset inventory of existing consumer engagement activities and initiatives in the assigned communities focusing on diabetes and builds on them.
4. Use the findings from the local concept mapping survey and other national research to identify a menu of evidence-based interventions addressing patient self-management and selecting high performing providers from which practices and community based agencies can select for implementation.
5. Work with consultant to implement phase two of the concept mapping process. Activities will include: conducting focus groups with patients, distributing/collecting surveys and disseminating survey results.

Currently, the CEAs are involved in these projects:

• Living Healthy
• Distribution and Promotion of the Diabetes Resource Guide

For More Information About the CEAs, check out their Quarterly Newsletter:

• May 2010
• January 2011