Since its inception, Partnerships for Quality Education (PQE) has focused on identifying the competences clinicians need to be successful in the evolving world of health care and supporting academic programs to incorporate them into their curricula.

PQE was launched in 1996 with an $8.3 million grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts. Guided by Pew's vision of better preparing primary care residents for practice in the evolving world of health care, PQE used its resources to foster collaboration between academic medical centers and managed care organizations. Between 1996 and 1999, PQE funded 66 partnerships to develop new curricula and new models for training future clinicians in the skills and competencies of managing care

In 1999, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) awarded PQE a grant of $8.9 million to continue its work in developing new models for education. With funding from RWJ, PQE continued its work on the Partnerships Program (Partnerships), and added initiatives in teamwork (Collaborative Interdisciplinary Team Education) and chronic illness management (Take Care to Learn).

See Grant Results Report: Partnerships for Quality Education.

In 2003, PQE launched the Achieving Competence Today (ACT) initiative to help residency and nurse practitioner programs transform teaching around systems and practice improvement. The ACT curriculum, which is delivered via the web, focuses on active, self-directed learning in which the resident's home institution becomes a laboratory for learning about systems and practice improvement. The concept was that programs would identify entrepreneurial residents, provide them with intensive, action-based learning experiences in systems and practice improvement, and link them with faculty to develop new curricula for all the program's residents.

Eighteen development partners were selected for the first round of the ACT program and were given grants of $25,000 to participate.

In 2004, PQE piloted a new approach to ACT which involves linking learners from multiple professions with quality improvement leaders in order to foster collaboration to improve care. To date, 16 academic health centers and over 200 learners have used participated in the pilot test of this new approach.

In 2004, twelve institutions were selected to participate in ACT II. Each institution was given $10,000 to participate for one year. Based on the experience and enthusiasm of the ACT II participants, we requested and received funding from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to continue the program for another year.