WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) today updated the nation’s most widely adopted way of organizing and evaluating patient-centered medical homes (PCMH) by releasing the latest generation of NCQA medical home standards, PCMH 2014.
The standards, which NCQA uses to assess primary care practices seeking NCQA PCMH Recognition, are the third iteration of the NCQA medical home program since 2008. Currently, over 10 percent of U.S. primary care practices—more than 35,500 clinicians at more than 7,000 practice sites—have earned NCQA PCMH Recognition. Many insurers pay higher reimbursement rates to practices that have earned the NCQA PCMH seal.
PCMH 2014 retains strengths of earlier NCQA standards, including alignment with contemporary federal requirements for “meaningful use” of health information technology—now Meaningful Use Stage 2.
“This latest generation of patient-centered medical home standards is an important step in the evolution of primary care into what patients want it to be: coordinated and focused on them,” said NCQA President Margaret E. O’Kane. “Patient-centered medical home 2014 raises the bar, especially with its emphasis on behavioral healthcare and care management for high-need populations.”
WHAT’S NEW
Changes affecting the advantages and requirements of NCQA PCMH Recognition include:
- Integration of behavioral health – Expectations rise, as they did in previous NCQA standards, that a practice support patients’ behavioral health. Practices are expected to collaborate with behavioral health care providers and to communicate behavioral health care capabilities to patients.
- Care management focus on high-need populations – Practices are expected to address socioeconomic drivers of health and poorly controlled or complex conditions. Practices should also focus on the special needs of patients referred from the “medical neighborhood” of practices that surround and inform the medical home.
- Enhanced emphasis on team-based care – Revised standards emphasize collaboration with patients as part of the care team and establish team-based care as a “must-pass” criterion for NCQA Recognition.
- Alignment of improvement efforts with the triple aim – Practices must show that they are working to improve across all three domains of the triple aim: patient experience, cost and clinical quality.
- Sustained transformation – In keeping with the goal of continuous improvement, practices show that they comply with NCQA standards over long periods.
GET THE STANDARDS
Download PCMH 2014 standards free of charge.
ABOUT PATIENT-CENTERED MEDICAL HOMES
The patient-centered medical home is a model of primary care that combines teamwork and information technology to improve care, improve patients’ experience of care and reduce costs. Medical homes foster ongoing partnerships between patients and their personal clinicians, instead of approaching care as the sum of episodic office visits. Each patient’s care is tended to by clinician-led care teams that coordinate treatments across the health care system. A growing preponderance of research confirms that medical homes can lead to higher quality, lower costs, and higher patient and provider satisfaction.
ABOUT NCQA
NCQA is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality. NCQA accredits and certifies a wide range of health care organizations. It also recognizes clinicians and practices in key areas of performance. NCQA’s Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS®) is the most widely used performance measurement tool in health care. NCQA’s Web site (ncqa.org) contains information to help consumers, employers and others make more informed health care choices.
