|
|
Practice Improvements:
Easy ways to enhance care delivery
The process of quality improvement is a self-directed process
in partnership with families. Determining which activities will have the
most benefit for the practice, and the families served, is an important
step to improving care. This section emphasizes that the Primary Care
Medical Home Model applies to acute illness management, preventive care
management and chronic condition management.
There are numerous activities described here to enhance
quality health care within the Primary Care Medical Home Model. Bright
Futures provides quality guidelines for well child care. Policies and
best practice models provide guidance for improving care in all three
components of the Primary Care Medical Home Model. In addition, some practical
strategies developed by medical home practices are also shared in this
section.
Integrating
Health and Related Systems of Care for Children with Special Health Care
Needs is an important role of providing a medical home for all children,
wherein primary care physicians have a vital role in the process of care
coordination, in concert with the family. Medical homes for children with
special health care needs incorporate the same elements of health supervision,
community-based preventive care, developmental surveillance, and anticipatory
guidance used in the ongoing care of all children. Care should be accessible,
comprehensive, continuous, compassionate, culturally effective, and family-centered.
The medical home reinforces care coordination activities by the primary
care practice team: the primary care physicians in collaboration with
nurses, families, and support staff. In pediatrics, family-centered
care is based on the understanding that the family is the child’s
primary source of strength and support. Further, this approach to care
recognizes that the perspectives and information provided by families,
children, and young adults are important in clinical decision making.
The following activities describe ways to enhance quality health care
in the three components of the primary care medical home model. Determining
which activities will have the most benefit for your practice, and the
families served, is an important step to improving care.
Practice Accommodations
The Primary Care Medical Home Model can be used to describe suggestions
for practice change based on 1) practical strategies, including educational
programs provided by professional organizations and 2) AAP/AAFP-endorsed
policies and best practice guidelines. The goal in developing practice
accommodations is to facilitate a more family-centered approach to primary
care in a practice along with organizing office procedures to proactively
provide care for CYSHCN. Families of CYSHCN have many challenges in their
daily lives, and obtaining appropriate health care and related services
for their child should not be one of them. We have provided guidelines
and suggestions for implementing practice accommodations for acute care
management, preventive care services and chronic condition management.
Each of these components of health care delivery can have strategies for
improvement that are unique, as well as general improvement efforts that
span all types of health care delivery. You can access information about
improvement strategies for each of these 3 components of health care from
the menu on the left side of the page.
-top of page-
In addition to a practical strategies approach for change, a practice
might consider using policies and best practice guidelines to structure
change. In 2005 the AAP developed the Partnership
for Policy Implementation (PPI). “A growing body of research
continues to demonstrate the distinct role of health information technology
(HIT) in facilitating quality improvement efforts and putting standards
of care into practice. It is the AAP’s belief that in order to meet
this growing trend, AAP statements must be “operationalized”
to provide HIT standard-developing groups and software designers with
specific, unambiguous content. The PPI aims to ensure that HIT implementations
are designed to meet the specific needs of child health professionals
by facilitating creation of some of the fundamental building blocks of
electronic health record (EHR) systems during the process of statement
development”.
As of 2007 three policies have been developed using the PPI approach.
The policies are Developmental Screening, Bronchiolitis and Flu Shots.
As more policies are converted to the new PPI standards, they will be
identified.
The goal in developing practice accommodations is to facilitate a more
family-centered approach to primary care in a practice along with organizing
office procedures to more proactively provide care for CSHCN.
-top of page-
|
|