HomeWhat's New What's your Medical Home IQ?

What's your Medical Home IQ?

04/29/2008

Free and flexible tool is available to all practices seeking to transform

After months of consultation, development and testing, the TransforMED MHIQ — a new Web-based self-assessment tool for primary care practices seeking to become Medical Homes is now available at http://www.transforMED.com/MHIQ.

TransforMED CEO Terry McGeeney, MD, MBA, appreciates the difficulty of practicing quality medicine while simultaneously transforming care and care processes. "Understanding and implementing the Patient Centered Medical Home concepts is neither intuitive nor easy for practices," he said. "The MHIQ tool is a valuable resource that walks practices through a process that helps them identify what specific areas of the Medical Home model need to be worked on to improve the performance of their practice."

The TransforMED MHIQ makes it easy to benchmark a practice's current performance. Answer a dozen or so short questions in each of eight core sets of competencies or "modules" and get a current score for the practice, along with access to resources and recommendations based on that score.

The TransforMED MHIQ – which stands for Medical Home Implementation Quotient – is a free tool, made available to help primary care and family medicine practices find out where they stand on the journey to becoming a Medical Home by measuring the practice against the eight components of the TransforMED Medical Home Model: Practice Management, Information Systems, Quality and Safety, Access to Care and Information, Team-Based Care, Continuity of Care Services and Point of Care Services. Find out more about the TMED Model.

"The MHIQ tool is built around concepts and processes necessary to develop a patient-centered approach to care. Improving access and timeliness of care, providing care based on evidence-based standards, and monitoring outcomes so that care processes and practice management can be continually improved are at the crux of this tool," said TransforMED Metrics Manager Elaine M. Skoch, RN, MN, CNAA, EMBA, who led the development of the project. "Every member of the health care team within a medical practice must understand how they fit into the process and this tool can help them with that understanding."

Providers and practice change leaders are invited to register for an account to access the tool, which assesses current standing, tracks improvement progress and allows users to email assessment results to themselves. Users may complete the eight modules in any order, at their own pace and even choose to return and finish a module at a later time — from right where they left off. A color-coded, at-a-glance "dashboard" provides feedback on which modules have been completed, which are in progress and which haven't been begun. Optional email reminders can be set to keep practice transformations top-of-mind.

"The TransforMED MHIQ is designed to be time-efficient, intuitive and easy-to-use while still providing quality feedback," said TransforMED consulting Web developer Rhondda Francis. "We anticipate that, like the TransforMED Medical Home Model, the MHIQ assessment will grow and evolve over time. As TransforMED gains new understanding of what works and what doesn't, what's critical for medical practices and what's only desirable, those learnings will be incorporated into future versions of the tool."

About TransforMED

TransforMED is focused on practice redesign and affiliated with the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP). TransforMED is studying and implementing transformed models of high performance practices that meet the needs of both patients and practices. In June 2006, TransforMED launched a 24-month National Demonstration Project (NDP), serving as a "learning lab" to generate new knowledge about the process of practice transformation and to systematically evaluate and compare the effect of two practice transformation approaches on practice and patient outcomes. As results and insights emerge, TransforMED professional staff are using the lessons learned from the NDP to develop services, collaboration tools and learning opportunities that empower physicians and primary care practices across the country as they implement the TransforMED Medical Home. TransforMED also coordinates a residency demonstration initiative known as P⁴ - P to the fourth power - which stands for Preparing the Personal Physician for Practice. The P⁴ residency demonstration initiative evaluates and supports innovations in family medicine residencies. To learn more about TransforMED and the TransforMED Medical Home, visit www.transformed.com.