Family Medicine Has Voice on MinuteClinic Advisory Council

MinuteClinic, a company that operates 82 retail health clinics in 10 states, has named FP Andrew Eisenberg, M.D., of Sarasota Fla., a member of the AAFP Commission on Practice Enhancement, to its National Clinical Quality Advisory Council.

Eisenberg will serve as the AAFP representative to the council, which will focus on quality improvement and measurement, not business decisions. In his role, Eisenberg is expected to help ensure patient safety by providing family medicine's perspective on quality of care measures.

MinuteClinic launched the council recently in an effort to elicit outside ideas. Council members will "contribute strategic creativity, clinical guidance and quality improvement ideas," says a MinuteClinic news release announcing the formation of the council.

AAFP representation on the council is an outgrowth of the Academy's involvement in ensuring that retail health clinics provide appropriate care to patients and complement the services patients receive in their medical homes. In March, the AAFP Board of Directors approved a list of retail clinic attributes that help define scope of practice, ensure referral to physician services when symptoms exceed clinic staff's scope of practice and identify an operating philosophy that encourages medical homes for patients.

Also named to the advisory council was Michael Fleming, M.D., of Shreveport, La., past president of AAFP and assistant clinical professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, Shreveport, and in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Tulane University Medical School, New Orleans.