Micky Tripathi“There are so many quality measures whether its AQC [The Alternative Quality Contract from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts], Pioneer ACO, PQRS, and pay for performance, so we simply feed a data summary from every encounter to the QDC via the information exchange, and they compute on our behalf all necessary quality analytics required by our government, payer, or others,” says Dr. Halamka.The
Adirondack Region Medical Home Pilot Program, which began in January 2010 as a $9 million joint initiative of medical providers and public and private insurers, also contracts with MAeHC for quality reporting. Organized into three geographic pods across the Adirondack North Country region, the program was designed to improve the care coordination and management of patients through a patient centered medical home (PCMH) model and the implementation of interoperable health IT. Last December, all of 31 primary care practices in that program were recognized as Level 3 Patient Centered Medical Homes– the highest level achievable—from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).The Adirondack Medical Home Pilot enlisted the support of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative when it was first awarded the HEAL NY Grant to help with EHR selection, implementation, adoption, and meaningful use reporting. "Meaningful use reporting is not a simple, straightforward process—the metrics are open to interpretation, and many of the metrics an organization might chose to report on are not directly supported by the EHRs built-in reporting capabilities," says Dennis Weaver, M.D., HEAL 10 program services director for the Adirondack Medical Home Pilot. "With the QDC we just upload our raw EHR data and they handle all of the aggregation, analytics and reporting, applying the latest reporting best practices as they go. It’s an excellent quality reporting tool for our Pilot.” Tripathi adds that the Adirondack Medical Home Pilot has seven EHR vendors spread across more than 200 clinicians. “All of their data is coming to us through
HIXNY, the Health Information Exchange New York, and we’re developing measures that we’re going to provide back to the seven health plans," says Tripathi. "Data goes back to care teams who are working with the practices to improve care and then going to the health plans who are going to fuel the payments they make to the patient-centered medical homes.”