Table 1

CPC Initiative Practice Characteristics Compared With National Benchmarks

Practice CharacteristicCPC Initiative Practices
(n = 496)
National Benchmark
Primary care or multispecialty practice: multispecialty, %11.96.1
Ownership, %
 Owned by hospital, hospital system, academic institution, or HMO43.810.5
 Owned by physicians54.489.5
 Owned by government or other organization1.8NR
Patient mix: African American patients, %4.613.4
Patients per FTE physician in practice, average No.1,475.5NR
Distribution of number of patients per FTE physicians in practice, %
 <5006.0NR
 500–1,00022.6NR
 1,000–1,49936.7NR
 1,500–1,99916.5NR
 2,000–2,4999.1NR
 ≥2,5009.0NR
Primary care physicians attesting as meaningful users of electronic health records, %67.817.8
Practice location, %
 Located in metropolitan area84.7NR
 Located in nonmetropolitan area15.3NR
  • CPC = Comprehensive Primary Care; FTE = full-time equivalent; HMO = health maintenance organization; NR = not reported.

  • Source: For CPC initiative practices, data for the percentage of African American patients per practice are from the Medicare Enrollment Data base; data on the number of patients per FTE physician per practice are from the patient roster; the other data are from the CPC initiative practice application. Metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas are based on the US Census urban/rural continuum code as reported in the 2009 Area Resource File. National benchmarks for electronic health record meaningful use estimates are based on meaningful-use attestation data provided by CMS and reported by Wright et al.40 All other national benchmarks come from a survey fielded between July 2007 and March 2009 for the National Study of Small and Medium-Sized Physician Practices, a nationally representative, random sample of 1,325 practices with fewer than 20 physicians drawn from the IMS Healthcare Organization Services database. The survey had an overall response rate of 63.2%. Results were restricted to practices that had at least 33% primary care physicians. Unlike the CPC initiative sample, a practice was not restricted to clinicians who were practicing in the same physical location.