A Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) is a model of care that incorporates processes such as EMRs (electronic medical record), clinical decision support, e-mail access, and quality measurement. The general consensus has been that these changes can improve patient outcomes and satisfaction, while reducing overall healthcare costs.
While these are lofty goals, the project, still in its infancy, should gain traction over the next ten years. Iron Comet has partnered with Mckesson to help doctors realize the potential for this new model by organizing a detailed approach to helping practices become a PCMH registered entity.
Our surveys asked about particular challenges and issues that independent practices face. There are tremendous complexities to overcome for all of us in healthcare. Here are the results:
Most Important Pressures
- Medicare/Medicaid payments
- Commercial Collections
- Billing issues
- Patient Recruitment/enrollment
- Malpractice issues
Along with deployment of EMRs, there are many ways to improve your practice with help from Iron Comet and Mckesson. Our goal is to help physicians transform their current status into a high performing medical practice. We will use gap assessment, overview of financial performance, and health information technology.
The American Academy of Family Physicians has issued some guidelines that will gauge where you are currently. Here are some of the questions they ask:
Are you using clinical information systems, allergy alerts, lab result tracking or medication interaction alerts?
Does your practice use these checklists and reminders?
Evidence based reminders
Preventative medicine reminders
Decision support
- Do you use encrypted email and patient portals?
- Are you using e-prescribing technologies?
- Are you using quality reporting tools?
- Do you have specific templates to collect clinical data?
- Does the practice rely on data to drive decisions to:
Improve quality and efficiency
Monitor supply and demand
The effects of PCMH will take some time to adhere to the community. After all, this is a different approach and certainly a welcome one. To redesign these processes, doctors will need to get accustomed to the shift in culture. Already we see patients having to adjust to physicians using EMR in the exam room and staff members taking on different roles. We will continue to evolve as technology and new ideas come upon us.
Iron Comet Consulting is a Mckesson Platinum certified reseller, medical IT firm and medical billing service based in Stockbridge, Georgia. Our products combine the clinical with the financial to improve workflow and revenue capture. Mckesson’s Medisoft Clinical is a complete physician practice optimization solution. For more information, please visit http://www.ironcomet.com
