Family doctors benefit from information
LEAWOOD, KAN. – As healthcare reform pushes the industry toward accountable care organization models and payment reform, the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) is hoping to offer its members a tool that will allow them to bring in revenue and improve the health of their patients.
The AAFP has partnered with healthcare claims processing company Emdeon to create a clinical data repository (CDR). The group is currently in the midst of a 12-month, three-phase pilot with about 40 physicians participating.
The CDR is meant to allow members to submit and retrieve clinical data, compare themselves anonymously to others, keep track of their patients and get a good grasp on what their practice looks like, financially and clinically. And it is system independent, said Gene Boerger, Emdeon’s vice president of provider product management. That means it can compare providers across multiple systems without having to integrate with those systems, Boerger said.
AAFP has been talking about creating a CDR for several years said Steven Waldren, MD, director of AAFP’s Center for Health IT, but it has only been as healthcare reform has moved toward pay-for-performance models that the business model for the CDR became stronger.
“With accountable care organizations/payment reform, now the higher quality that you provide at the lower cost, the more revenue that you’re going to be able to generate so the technologies that are needed for the current world are not the same as the future world. The CDR really fits in that future world of being able to manage populations and understand where your practice is at,” said Waldren. “So as that is valued in the marketplace it makes it easier for return on investment for practices to devote resources and money to support a clinical data repository initiative.”
For Dennis Saver, a Florida-based family physician participating in the CDR pilot, for the CDR to be valuable to him and is practice, the clinical data part of the project is the key.
“Administrative data alone is not very useful for my practice,” he said. “I remain hopeful that the CDR will grow into a clinical data repository, with registries populated by real-time clinical information. The CDR could then be in a position to submit quality of care data/(pay-for-performance) data to insurers/Medicare on my behalf with a lot less trouble than me figuring out how to run the right reports and submit the right data. It would also provide a rich substrate for benchmarking and clinical research ‘in the real world,’ as opposed to highly selected populations used in ‘clinical trials,’ which often do not match up too well to the patients I am treating.”
Saver’s hope for the CDR is the goal of the AAFP. “Really it is about providing our members with the tools to deliver high quality, cost effective care,” said Waldren. “We think when you look at the research that’s out there, primary care is the best at that, but we know that we can do better. We want to be able to help our members do that.”