How to Manage the Pace of Practice Innovation Information Flow and Change? Introducing the ADFM Patient Centered Medical Home Taskforce

These are exciting times for family medicine/primary care, and departments of family medicine are increasingly engaged in clinical innovation in order to meet the needs of our patients and our discipline.¹ Keeping up with the rapid flow of information and change presents a major challenge: How to coordinate the active and ever-moving dialogues regarding PCMH with local, regional and national leaders, and garner insights from the cacophony of demonstration projects and initiatives into useable information for our members and their departments? How do we incorporate all of the missions of academic departments (clinical, educational and scholarship) into curricular redesign and clinical effectiveness research, in addition to the clinical practice transformation required?

As described in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of the Annals of Family Medicine, ADFM is working with the Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC) to further our own departments’ strengths and evolution in clinical areas related to the Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH). However, even within this one organization there is an ever increasing number of initiatives, centers, communication mechanisms, and publications, from which are a host of emerging allied enterprises, Web sites, and resources. ADFM leadership is desirous of creating an ongoing method for distilling down the breadth of this rapidly moving target, as well as to utilize the talents of our members to create a proactive dialogue of ideas and information back to PCPCC and other PCMH entities. To accomplish this, a new PCMH task force in ADFM has been formed to support, stimulate and monitor this synergistic exchange between Departments of Family Medicine and the Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative, NCQA, CAFM, and other groups with similar activities. The overarching goal of the task force is to facilitate ADFM and family medicine playing an active role in the evolving PCMH domain, with 3 specific objective as illustrated below:

1. Information Clearinghouse – to serve as a source of information to the ADFM membership re: PCMH activities, resources, advocacy issues, etc.

2. Proactive Advocacy Role (“Strike Force” or “Rapid Response Team”) – to identify PCMH task force and other ADFM members to be available to serve as contributors/informants among the many constituent groups that are working at the national level on primary care transformation related to medical homes.

3. Mission Integration – to go beyond traditional ADFM Clinical Committee functions, in order to integrate clinical transformation with our educational programs and our outcomes research; this is what makes our contributions unique as academic departments. Task force membership would include members of each ADFM standing committee (Clinical, Research Development, Medical Student Education, Residency, Legislative Affairs, etc). The goal would be to integrate missions across areas and topics in a synergistic, complementary manner.

The PCMH task force has its work cut out for it. It must formalize and modify its charge as conditions change, coordinate among its members, the ADFM officers, board, and the entirety of ADFM membership, and communicate both internally and externally. A set of deliverables for this group is expected to be presented after the ADFM Winter meeting in late February 2010, and will be posted to the ADFM Web site. Becoming an active force in shaping the evolution of this movement is the penultimate task; with the ultimate goal of better serving and improving the health-care needs of the US populations.

• © 2010 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.