Grants Fund Evaluation of Patient-Centered Care

TransforMED's national demonstration project has received a six-figure financial boost, thanks to support from the Commonwealth Fund.

TransforMED, a division of the Academy, was established in 2005 to help put into practice the recommendations of the Future of Family Medicine Project report, which called for the creation of a new model of care for family medicine. In April 2006, 36 family medicine practices were chosen to participate in a 24-month national demonstration project that launched in June.

On Nov. 14, the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that supports work to improve the nation's health care system, awarded the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio a $238,822 grant for a project titled "Evaluating the Effect of Primary Care Practice Transformation on Patient-Centered Care."

A smaller grant of nearly $25,000 was awarded to the same Texas institution in October and was designated as preliminary funding for the same project. Together, the grants total nearly $264,000; the full amount will be used to enhance the evaluation of the TransforMED demonstration project.

"The Commonweath Fund has been a strong advocate for primary care-based health care in the United States," said TransforMED President and CEO Terry McGeeney, M.D., M.B.A. "This funding makes a statement as to the value of the demonstration project and endorses the importance of understanding the critical role patient-centered care plays in the delivery of quality health care."

Grant applicant and principal investigator Carlos Jaén, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the department of family and community medicine at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, along with other members of the demonstration project evaluation team, now have funding to widen the scope of the evaluation portion of the project to include the patient's unique perspective.

As part of that process, selected patients from each of the 36 practices will receive extensive questionnaires from the evaluation team asking about their most recent experiences with the practice, said Jaén.

"It's easy to focus on the technology and the major changes and to lose sight of the patient in the process," said Jaén. But practice transformation "is really all about providing better patient-centered care."

The Center for Research in Family Medicine and Primary Care, a consortium of five institutions, has been chosen to oversee the evaluation of TransforMED's national demonstration project. Key members of the evaluation team are Benjamin Crabtree, Ph.D., Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, New Brunswick, N.J.; William Miller, M.D., M.A., Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network, Allentown, Pa.; Paul Nutting, M.D., M.S.P.H., University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Denver; and Kurt Stange, M.D., Ph.D., Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland.