Your Medical Home: Well-Designed Using a Quality Improvement Process
The Patient and Family Centered Medical Home (PFCMH) and Quality Improvement (QI) go together like bricks and mortar, hammer and nail, petrol and vehicle — the medical home and making ongoing improvements are the journey and the destination entwined.
The fundamentals for solid practice improvement include forming a medical home improvement team (Teamwork- The Cornerstone for Medical Home Improvement Document) who:
- Has the will to change
- Gain ideas to help with changes, and
- Possess developed skills to execute tests of change in preparation for practice wide implementation. (Implementation is most successful after small tests of change helps to "get it right").
Once the change areas are identified, a method for testing and successfully implementing ideas will be needed. The Model for Improvement provides such a method, drawing upon a few simple steps to help with the adaptation of good ideas and tools and by creating the right practice environment in which to successfully implement them.
The Model for Improvement poses three basic questions:
What are you trying to accomplish?
A high quality efficient and recognized medical home.
How will you know that a change is an improvement?
By measuring tests of change (patient, practice, system) using patient questions or feedback; clinician and staff measures and utilization data)
What changes can you make that will result in improvement?
Look to your professional organizations and/or to CMHI for improvement tools, guidance and change ideas ready for you to test and improve upon.
