Three Provider Groups Becoming PCMHs With Help from CORHIO
Date: July 22nd, 2015Category: CORHIO e-NewsletterTopics: Transformation Support Services, Medical Home ModelHilltop Family Physicians, Summit Medical Clinic and Metro Community Provider Network – all current participants in the CORHIO HIE network – are working with CORHIO’s Transformation Support Services team to achieve medical home recognition by NCQA.
The process of becoming a recognized patient-centered medical home (PCMH)TM can be time-consuming for primary care practices and medical clinics, especially for smaller groups with limited resources. CORHIO’s medical home experts are working closely with providers across the state to help them through the NCQA patient-centered medical home process.
Practices are motivated to become medical homes for many reasons such as negotiating better rates with payers, incentivizing staff to make improvements, and improving overall standing in the community – but the core motivation is to enhance patient care. “We believe medical home accreditation represents the best possible care that our patients can have,” says Michael Garcia, Project Manager at Metro Community Provider Network. “It shows that we’re committed to the well-being of our patients from a holistic perspective. We feel like achieving this accreditation will help us develop the systems and structures to deliver that type of care as well as achieve the recognition to let the patients know that this is our mission.”
Getting it All Down on Paper
Once practices dig into the medical home requirements, many realize they’re already following the NCQA procedures, so it’s just a matter of documenting it. “We feel like we already do many of the patient-centered criteria and we have been for years – we just never wrote it all down,” says Jennifer Souders, Practice Administrator at Hilltop Family Physicians.
“Summit is in the CPCI program so we’ve already been doing a lot of these [PCMH] requirements – and we want to get the recognition to show our community what kind of work we do and how dedicated our providers are. We are already doing the work, so why not get the recognition, too?” says Neelam Chopra, Office Manager at Summit Medical Clinic.
New Scorecard Tool Helps Clinics Concentrate on Important Processes
The CORHIO team uses a new interactive tool to assess where the practices stand on the NCQA requirements early on in the process. The tool identifies the “must-pass” critical factors and the other elements required to be recognized at level 1, 2 or 3 (3 being the highest). This helps to focus the project on certain areas and gives insight into how much work is required.
“The interactive tool is invaluable – I can’t say enough about the value it’s brought to us and our ability to manage the application using it,” says Garcia. “It tells us what the standards are, gives us an opportunity to input feedback on where we are at in the process and scores us based on the assessment so we know where we stand. If we think we’ll have trouble meeting a certain factor, we can see our score without it and determine if we can proceed with the other elements. I can’t imagine pursuing PCMH recognition without having CORHIO’s tool available to us.”
One Step at a Time
The Transformation Support Services team helps practices bite off manageable chunks of the medical home application to work on. This helps the process not be so overwhelming and bolsters the practice team with early wins to keep their confidence up.
“It’s very time-consuming to dot the I’s and cross the T’s,” says Souders. “With the CORHIO team walking me through the process and giving me pieces and bites to do is really wonderful – instead of trying to tackle the whole project. When I saw that we only needed three more elements to pass, I thought OK, that’s not so bad, we can do this!”
“We are a very small practice and we don’t have that many resources,” says Chopra. “The CORHIO team is very helpful -- I can just call them and get the support we need. This service is a great resource to the community,” she says.
Medical Home Session at Upcoming Event
Mark your calendar for CORHIO’s next Boot Camp event on Meaningful Use, medical home recognition, health information exchange and more. The event will be held October 20th at the Hilton Garden Inn in the Denver Tech Center. As we have more details, they will be posted at www.corhio.org/events