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Healthcare quality organization releases updated standards for Physician Practice Connections
(Science Letter Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)
The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) released updated standards for Physician Practice Connections, a program that recognizes medical practices that make systematic use of clinical information to deliver excellent patient care.
The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) will incorporate PPC standards into its Maintenance of Certification program for 180,000 Diplomates.
The collaboration promises to introduce the program, and provide consistent guidance for quality improvement efforts using a harmonized set of measures, to a significant number of doctors over the next several years.
Approximately 12,000 ABIM-certified physicians annually apply to maintain their certification; Maintenance of Certification is required once every 10 years. There are currently 124 PPC-recognized practices nationwide, representing more than 1,400 physicians. The practices range in size from large to small; over half of all PPC-recognized practices comprise four or fewer doctors.
Additionally, Cisco, Intel, Oracle, and other leading Silicon Valley technology firms announced the formation of a consortium of employers, medical groups and independent practice associations (IPAs) that will reward doctors who meet PPC standards.
The Silicon Valley Pay-for-Performance Consortium brings together some of the largest medical groups and independent practice associations (IPAs) in Northern California, including Camino Medical Group, Kaiser Permanente, Palo Alto Medical Foundation, San Jose Medical Group, Santa Clara County IPA, Santa Cruz Medical Foundation and Stanford Hospital and Clinics.
The revised PPC standards have been fine-tuned to make them consistent with other public and private initiatives promoting the adoption of practice-wide quality measurement and information technology in doctors' offices. Under the new standards, physicians will be awarded Recognition at one of three levels based upon the number of standards they meet. The standards assess whether physicians:
-follow standards of care that are based on medical evidence,
-provide good access to patients seeking appointments, and by being available either on the telephone or through email,
-maintain patient registries (lists of patients by diagnosis) for the purpose of measuring clinical quality practice-wide and identifying at-risk patients for appropriate follow-up;
-provide educational resources to patients to help them self-manage their conditions,
-use electronic systems to gather information about patients, maintain patient records, provide decision support, enter orders for prescriptions and lab tests and provide automated reminders about services or tests that patients need, and
-use electronic systems that interoperate with other systems using nationally accepted code sets to send, receive and integrate data such as test results from other organizations' systems.
NCQA is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality.
This article was prepared by Science Letter editors from staff and other reports. Copyright 2006, Science Letter via NewsRx.com.
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