AAFP RELEASES MEDICAL HOME RECOGNITION GUIDE, RELAUNCHES ENHANCED FAMILYDOCTOR.ORG WEB SITE
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* Sheri Porter
* Cindy Borgmeyer

The AAFP is continuing its commitment to the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) with the release of a guide to medical home recognition and the relaunch of its popular consumer Web site, FamilyDoctor.org, with enhanced video capabilities.

As a service to members, the AAFP has produced a guide to help FPs who are interested in achieving PCMH recognition from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).

“Road to Recognition—Your Guide to NCQA Medical Home,” which was supported in part by grants from the United Health Foundation and Pfizer Inc, is available free to Academy members and can be downloaded from the Academy’s Web site.

NCQA, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality, introduced its Physician Practice Connections—Patient-Centered Medical Home program in January 2008. The NCQA program uses standards that are aligned with the Academy’s Joint Principles of the Patient-Centered Medical Home to designate family medicine practices as medical homes.

For a fee, practices can achieve 1 of 3 levels of recognition as they implement and document program requirements.

Bruce Bagley, MD, the AAFP’s medical director of quality improvement, said the Academy acted to produce the guide after hearing member feedback that the NCQA medical home documentation process was complex and nearly unmanageable.

“We’ve provided tools, examples, and templates to make that process as painless and as easy as possible,” said Bagley. “We’ve tried to break it down into manageable steps.” The first step in using the multi-faceted guide is to read through the NCQA standards to understand how they are constructed and scored, he said.

Bagley added that NCQA medical home recognition would do more than give FPs in some markets an opportunity to earn bonus payments. “The process also benefits physicians in terms of improved practice efficiency and practice organization.”

In addition, the AAFP has collaborated with multi-platform video distributor AnswersMedia Inc, to redesign the Academy’s award-winning consumer Web site, FamilyDoctor.org.

The redesigned site integrates FamilyDoctor.org’s existing peer-reviewed health information with interactive, high-definition video-on-demand. Coproduced by the Academy and Chicago-based AnswersMedia under the name Primetime HealthNet, FamilyDoctor.org is the only medical association-sponsored Web site offering vetted health care information in text-based, video, and combined formats.

According to AAFP President Ted Epperly, MD, of Boise, Idaho, “FamilyDoctor.org is taking health information to a whole new level.”

“Visitors will not only be able to read about their own health issues, they’ll be able to see and hear the latest clinical information on the same site,” he says in an introductory video posted on the site. “Health videos, news and perspectives, interactive tools, and quizzes will soon all be found on FamilyDoctor.org.”

“Video-on-demand is the new frontier in information-sharing, and there is no more important topic than health care,” said AAFP Vice President for Publishing and Communications Michael Springer.

“Changes in the health care system will demand that patients are better informed and take more responsibility for their own health and wellness,” Springer added. “The new FamilyDoctor.org will give them the tools to do this even more effectively. Now patients will not only be able to read about various conditions, they will be able to see and to hear what these conditions mean to them and to their families.”

For example, video content on FamilyDoctor.org can provide visuals on health care information that may be difficult to convey in text format, such as how to do a breast self-examination or what to expect during a colonoscopy.

The redesigned site features nearly 100 videos, including many in Spanish, on common medical conditions, treatments and preventive health services. The videos are drawn from health programming created by AnswersTV, a division of AnswersMedia. More videos and a variety of other resources will be added in the coming months, including

*   A daily newscast that features health-related news;

*   Assigned trigger points in videos that will allow visitors to access bonus content, including promotional materials;

*   Expandable and searchable text surrounding video content; and

*   Content that can be e-mailed to others.

*   © 2009 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.