Tips to guarantee successful patient centered medical homes

The patient centered medical home (PCMH)- once a somewhat nebulous concept-has become more tangible over the last eight years as primary care organizations have implemented strategies to achieve its fundamental tenets.

With the model tested and observed, rigorous and creative quality measures, well-planned and coordinated care, and inventive access initiatives, paired with dutiful patient tracking, have all emerged as elements of a successful PCMH.

Measurement that transcends standards

There are certain quality measures that every organization is tracking, generally due to payer or government mandates. Most organizations implementing or attempting to implement the PCMH model are already scoring 90% or above in these metrics.

However, once an organization reaches that plateau, those metrics are likely no longer delivering useful information to drive further quality improvement.

One way PCMHs are finding new areas to improve is by tracking multiple data measures and correlating them to find areas for improvement.

For example, every organization tracks average wait time. Better organizations will correlate all the information they can gather from their EHRs on wait time with their patient opinion surveys. In doing so, they determine if there are specific moments in the patient care experience that affect how patients perceive whether the wait time was appropriate.

The best organizations are tracking 200 or more metrics. Think about how much technology or credit card companies know about you; primary care doctors–who actually have a benevolent use for that data–should be making similar efforts to learn about their patients and how to improve their care experience.

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