Family Health Center Earns National Recognition

The Family Health Center at Franklin Square has achieved Level 3 recognition status from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), through the Physician Practice Connections®—Patient-Centered Medical Home™ program (PPC-PCMH), for using evidence-based, patient-centered processes that focus on highly coordinated care and long-term participative relationships.

The Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) is a model of healthcare delivery that aims to improve the quality and efficiency of care. PCC-PCMH identifies practices that promote partnerships between individual patients and their personal clinicians, instead of treating patient care as the sum of several episodic office visits.

Each patient’s care is tended to by clinician-led care teams, who provide for all the patient’s health care needs and coordinate treatments across the healthcare system. Medical home clinicians demonstrate the benchmarks of patient-centered care, including open scheduling, expanded hours and appropriate use of proven health information systems.

Early evaluations of the PPC-PCMH have shown promising results in improving care quality and lowering costs by increasing access to more efficient, more coordinated care. By avoiding unnecessary hospitalizations and emergency room visits, these results can translated into savings for payers, purchasers and patients.

Franklin Square Hospital Center, in particular, has an added responsibility. As a community teaching hospital, it is educating young physicians and medical students on the principles of the PCMH. They can then incorporate successful methods into their future practice.

To earn this 3-year distinction, the Family Health Center successfully demonstrated the ability to meet the program’s key elements embodying characteristics of the medical home, including:

• written standards for patient access and enhanced communications;
• appropriate use of charting tools to track patient and organize clinical information
• responsive care management techniques with an emphasis on preventive care
• adaptation to patient’s cultural and linguistic needs
• use of information technology for prescriptions and care management
• use of evidence-based guidelines to treat chronic conditions
• systematic tracking of referrals and test results
• measurement and reporting of clinical and service performance.