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Forum Can Help Practices Enhance Chronic Care, Boost Overall Quality

By News Staff
8/1/2007

Family medicine practices interested in improving care for their patients with chronic illnesses and instituting a quality improvement, or QI, project may want to take part in the Academy's Michigan Practice Enhancement Forum, or PEF. An added bonus: Family physicians who participate can complete their American Board of Family Medicine Maintenance of Certification Program for Family Physicians, or MC-FP, Part IV requirement.

For Your Benefit
The forum invites 12 family medicine teams in Michigan to redesign their practices by implementing components of the patient-centered chronic care model and QI strategies. The teams comprise a family physician; a back-office staff person such as a medical assistant, nurse or physician assistant; and a front-office staff person such as the practice manager, receptionist or billing specialist.

The program is divided into the following three sections:
  • Precourse homework. This homework includes registering for one of the AAFP's METRIC -- that's Measuring, Evaluating and Translating Research Into Care -- modules and conducting the module's initial online practice assessment and chart review; completing an overview of the chronic care model; and reviewing an introduction to quality improvement principles.
  • A live, two-day course. During the course, each practice will meet with its QI mentor and participate in an interactive, hands-on education session.
  • A six-month, post-course quality-improvement project. For this activity, each team will develop an action plan and work with the team's QI mentor to implement practice improvements.
Practice teams can choose from among five clinical topic areas in which to complete their improvement activities: asthma, coronary artery disease, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or geriatrics. The first four of these areas reflect the four clinical topics covered by the AAFP's available METRIC modules and correspond to MC-FP Part IV modules.

Early-bird registration ends Aug. 10 for the Oct. 19-20 PEF in Dearborn, Mich.

The PEF program was developed under the auspices of the AAFP Commission on Quality. The program's goal is to improve the quality of patient care in small to medium-sized practices through adoption of the chronic care model developed by Edward Wagner, M.D., M.P.H., of the MacColl Institute for Healthcare Innovation, Seattle, and implementation of related practice redesign elements and QI components.