Cost & Efficiency

When Universal Primary Care (UPC) needed to transition to a new electronic medical record (EMR) system at the same time they were starting to work on NCQA Patient Center Medical Home (PCMH) certification and “meaningful use” attestation, they contracted with the Upstate New York Practice Based Research Network and P2 Collaborative of Western New York to bring in a Practice Enhancement Associate (PEA).

Read the rest of this AF4Q Bright Spot here.

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In 2006, Medical Care Development (MCD) successfully obtained grant funding over two years to establish the Maine Practice Improvement Network (MPIN). At that time, MCD partnered with five large regional Physician Hospital Organizations, the Maine Medical Association, the Maine Primary Care Association, and multiple physician practices throughout the state, to form the Maine Practice Improvement Network. The goal was to create a structure and a process for the members of the MPIN to share effort, cost, resources, and learning related to office...

The Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q) Puget Sound Health Alliance knew that increasing generic prescribing could translate into significant savings without compromising quality.

Armed with this knowledge, the Alliance used a multi-stakeholder process to create a report on variations in generic drug prescribing among and within medical groups in the four classes of drugs measured in the 2011 Community Checkup.

Read the rest of this AF4Q Bright Spot...

Millions of Americans undergo costly and often invasive diagnostic procedures each year. Sometimes these tests help them avoid even more invasive tests, but are they really what the doctor ordered? Some new work in Minnesota points to signs that too many unnecessary high-tech diagnostic imaging (HTDI) scans are being made, which is a large contributing factor in the meteoric rise in health care costs.

HTDI use has been increasing at 15 percent to 20 percent annually—twice the rate of prescription drugs and far greater than the 10 percent...

The Maine Health Management Coalition (MHMC), a partner in AF4Q Maine, wanted to encourage its members to seek care from the high quality, cost-effective providers MHMC identified. But MHMC encountered three problems:

  1. getting people to use the publicly reported quality information, 
  2. helping labor and management to see eye-to-eye on changing benefits to get care at a better...

The Wisconsin Sentinel covers the challenges and complexity groups in the state such as the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality, the state’s AF4Q Alliance, face to gather health care quality information using Medicare claims data.
Read the article.
 

The Aligning Forces for Quality November 2011 National Meeting was held in Washington DC and was broken up into three distinct tracks: Payment, Care Across Settings, and Cost.  View video highlights on discussions and lectures below!  

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AF4Q South Central Pennsylvania hosted “Improving the Quality & Value of Health Care,” a summit for employers and providers that showcased innovations in health care delivery. Keynoting the event was Paul Grundy, who spoke about the merits of patient-centered medical homes (PCMH), which are designed to foster close relationships between consumers and their primary care physicians. PCMHs are coming alive in South Central Pennsylvania through the Planned Care Collaborative. Karen Jones, MD, explained the value to patients, providers, and employers. “By tying in the...