Five Primary Care Practices Have Achieved PCMH ‘Gold Standard’; 12 Additional Practices on Road to NCQA Success

Ambulatory Services Team Update

By Jillian Barone-Greenbaum, Director of Ambulatory Services Transformation and Provider Engagement

The Millennium Ambulatory Services Transformation Team has been hard at work helping primary care partners attain Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) 2014 National Committee Quality Assurance (NCQA) Recognition – the Gold Standard for practice transformation.

The Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) is an approach to providing comprehensive primary care for children, youth and adults by facilitating partnerships between individual patients, and their personal physicians, and when appropriate, the patient’s family. The PCMH model can create greater value for patients, providers and payers. As patients are given better access to coordinated care, many factors that drive up costs are impacted significantly including the increase of preventive services; improved immunization rates, decline in emergency department visits and in-patient
hospitalizations, and overall decrease of health care costs.

Since the Millennium Ambulatory Services Transformation Team was formally assembled in early 2016, it has provided PCMH consultative services to 14 partner organizations, including many that have multiple sites. Overall, Millennium Collaborative Care is on target to have 100% of engaged safety net practices achieve 2014 PCMH Status by the end of Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) Program Year 3 (March 31, 2018).

To date, the following organizations have been supported in the achievement of Patient Centered Medical Home Recognition by the Millennium Team:

• ECMC Family Health Center
• ECMC Internal Medicine Clinic
• ECMC Grider Family Health Center
• The Resource Center
• Community Health Center of Buffalo
• Olean Medical Group

In addition, there are organizations that have either submitted their corporate survey and are actively working on submitting their site-specific elements, or have submitted their survey and are awaiting a ruling from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA). These include:

• Kaleida Health Primary Care Clinics
• Universal Primary Care
• TLC Health
• Rapha Family Medicine
• Elmwood Health Center

Lastly, we don’t want to forget the groups that are actively working hard to obtain PCMH Recognition! These primary care practices are:

• Lockport Pediatrics
• Northtown Medical
• Omega Family Health
• Foothills Medical Group
• The Chautauqua Center
• The Heartbeat Center

The achievement of Patient Centered Medical Home Recognition is a rigorous and time-consuming activity, sometimes taking over a full year of reporting and process/workflow transformation within a busy primary care office. All recognized primary care practices and their team members are highly commended for your ongoing efforts!