Programs

Improving Performance in Practice

Overview

Primary care settings provide most of the preventive and chronic disease care in our country and advances in the quality of primary care could have profound influence on the health of the population.

Traditional board certification and continuous medical education have focused on building the physician's knowledge base. The medical boards are now emphasizing improvement of quality with a focus on developing better systems of care in order to take full advantage of advances in the physician's knowledge base.

With funding from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) has contracted with the Center for Health care Quality at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center to design a program called Improving Performance in Practice (IPIP) to support clinicians in improving the quality of primary care.

Aim of Improving Performance in Practice

The aim of Phase I of IPIP is to design a state-based approach that can support efforts by primary care providers, including internists, family physicians and pediatricians and their care teams, to improve the way chronic illness and preventive care is provided to patients. The approach builds on a conceptual model that involves the use of three components to assist physicians in improving the quality of care they provide which include:

Web-based improvement modules
Collaborative Improvement Networks
Data collection and sharing

The program will initially focus on diabetes, asthma and preventive care as important areas for improvement. The design phase will better define how these components can work together to achieve improvements in primary care and identify areas needed to support efforts to improve care across a variety of practice sites.

The design phase will incorporate opportunities to integrate IPIP with other current or emerging efforts at state, regional and national levels in order to complement current efforts in quality improvement for primary care.