Fwd: were you on the 3 pm call yestreday ?NCQA

[Guest guest]

Excuse my obsessivenessOn the 3 pm call today i thought i was paying attention but suddenly i heard my name and i was supposed to say something about the NCQA work

I have not looked at this stuff for weeks and could not collect my thoughts and heaven knows what I said .

In case you care here is wha t I wish i said becasuse some of you may be interest ed Other s kow where " deleer " isNCQA is National Comittee on Quality Assurane which is an organization that youprobably eithe r have heard of,or think you have even if you do not know why. They are an independetn organzation sort of " selling " qua;ity as i understand it becasue the health care system is so broken and people like i think namely insurers and employesr wan to make sure they get " quality' for their dollars

Any of us in the IMP prpject who have gotten this far have a pretty good handle on quality But NCQA has this intiaitve called the Patietn Centered Medical Home -PCMH-and what they do is, they get docs to pay money to be measured- to see if they pass muster to be a PCMH.

Some IMPs were silly enough to actually volunteer to go through this to see what it is like and how we measure up ( we were tired that day I dunno) so, what it consists of is a very long complex docuemnt I printed it becase i could not work with it electroncially

there are 9 parts called elements some of which have subparts, and each has questions basically that it asks you about as it assumes that thos e questions are the things that make up a good pcmh Questions like about access It is very bureaucratic-- it will ask if you have a policy to provide triaging for approproiate access then it asks if you have a policy for scheduling based on the paitents condition ,and do you have a policy based on family's request for timely appointmetns and do you have a policy to answer phone calls within a certain time etcetc Then they ask you to prove tha tyou are doing it by say taking screen shots or by having you keep a log of when say called and when you actually saw her

It has 9 parts many with sub parts ,each of thos e with several questions that you must account forand prove . then it has scoring -- some parts are MUst pass, some not Then you can turn out ,based on your scoring, to be a level 1 or 2 or 3 PCMH

It is more a test of the quality of your emr an d you rpolicies than really of taking care of people( and so we spent time writin g up polcies because while we already DO the work , we wrote up policies to say in what way we were able to, in our office, say, provide servcies for those who do not speak english .Two providers said " I know who they are !! when they come in I speak spanish to them " but we wrote up some policy-speak stuff .

NCQA is some attempt to get at measuring somethings that might matter...It is due to be revised anyway in 2010If you apply to test this out, it costs 80.00 to get the license for the aplication and you get to make up a passwrod,I made Don 007, and they actually when you order your applciation -get this-send you a n email from ncqa about your " order " tellin g you " this is in s tock "

Of course it is in stock it is a bunch of elctrons sorted up into words!! It is not an LL Bean shirt!! very sillythen you go through this whole tool and pay another 430.00 to submit it and get t " recognized' which makes you a pcmh which may or may not do anything for you excpet warm your heart and hope some " payor " will sned more dolla rs( a smidge of cynicism thrown in there)

we have 6 victims I mean volunteers try this outI think that is what i suppose to tell you If anyone is interested in doing it and needs help Don will be happy othelp you. He had a great Super Chicken song about this " you knew the job was dangerous when you took it " he told us....or i will

Hope that helpssigned obsessive but flakyjean-- If you are a patient please allow up to 12 hours for a reply by email/please note the new email address.Remember that e-mail may not be entirely secure/

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-- If you are a patient please allow up to 12 hours for a reply by email/please note the new email address.Remember that e-mail may not be entirely secure/ MD

ph fax