Quality
Voices of the Community: Our Patient Family Advisory Council
Mission Statement
Ritner Medical Patient Family Advisory Council provides a voice of the patient or family and an opportunity to work collaboratively and positively impact our medical home and neighborhood.
Vision Statement
Partner with patients and families to build a sustainable council that develops an innovative care delivery model that focuses on improving patient outcomes in primary care.
Goals & Objectives
Build a PFAC that is sustainable.
Discuss shared goals and develop meaningful solutions/processes.
Understand the patient-centered multi-factorial needs.
Build a strong framework to deliver comprehensive services to include physical, psycho-social, community based resources.
Create measurable goals and standards to monitor improvement and performance.
PFAC: Where We have Been & Where We are Going
Something we focus our efforts on is always listening to the voice of our patients. We receive feedback in various forms, from a survey given to patients to a suggestion box in our waiting room and even from patients calling our office. One important method of feedback has been our Patient Family Advisory Council (PFAC). This group of patients and their families has provided us with valuable and actionable feedback to make meaningful change. One of our initial projects mentioned by our PFAC was our phone access. In October, 2016 we implemented a new phone system which we used to alleviate a dreaded busy signal or no way to relay your message to the office if the lines were busy. Our new phone system allowed for call triaging and ability to leave a message with our staff. We thought we were getting it right but providing more access, but what we didn't hear was the feedback from our patients.
The phone system also gave us something we never had before, data. Data is very useful in understanding how we can staff better to meet the growing demand of calls. Our phone system allows us track our progress and make staff adjustments to better suit the needs of our patients, because to us, Every.Call.Matters.
What does Success Look Like?
At Ritner Medical Associates we now track monthly our total calls we receive and review our missed calls. Missed calls allows us to understand the number of calls we are unable to answer immediately and guides workflow decisions to further improve. The ability to track monthly data also acts as a barometer that indicates if our new processes are pointing us in the right direction. Since January, we have made office process changes in how we answer calls and have reduced our missed call rate by nearly half, with a goal of less than 10% of calls by end of 2019. To us, success is making meaningful interactions, on the first call.
Interested in joining? email messages@ritnermedicalphila.com
Quality Matters: Here's How We're Doing
Every day we look at ways for improvement from the phones and access to quality that counts. One of the ways we track our progress is by looking at our quality metrics. So, what does that mean? We are "graded" by most insurance companies and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on how well we are able to discuss, recommend, and remind patients to complete necessary preventative and chronic care screenings and tests. Some of this we can achieve our office with you for screenings like Depression and fall risk, but other screenings happen at a lab or imaging center, for example a mammogram or blood work. Below is our actual quality measures across our patients on some key metrics:
Improving Everyday. What we're doing to Provide Quality Care.
Across all of the healthcare industry today there are multiple initiatives to reduce the healthcare spend. Many of these initiatives are aimed at reducing avoidable hospitalizations, ER visits, and directing patients back to Primary Care. One strongly adopted way to begin to reduce costs and improve health care is to build a strong foundation of a medical home that is patient-centered, accessible, coordinated, team-based, and quality and safety driven. Below are some initiatives and organizations that we are apart of, to do our part, and improve everyday.
CPC+
Comprehensive Primary Care + is a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Innovation Center model that focuses on the concepts of an advanced medical home and helps practices to help strengthen care delivery transformation through payment reform. There are only 18 regions nationally that are eligible to participate and of which, the Greater Philadelphia Region was selected for participation. We have been actively participating since 1/1/2017.
For additional information, just ask us! OR you can check out their website: https://innovation.cms.gov/initiatives/comprehensive-primary-care-plus
Accountable Care Organizations
Care Is Primary ACO, LLC
An accountable care organization concentrates on ways to coordinate care with other health care providers and with health systems to reduce duplicate testing, avoid unnecessary admissions or ER visits, and work collaboratively to reduce the overall cost of the patient. These voluntary programs drive practices from the traditional fee-for-service world to a fee-for-value model. Our practice participates in 2 separate ACO models. Care is Primary ACO, LLC is very specific ACO, developed by CMS' Center for Innovation that focused on Medicare lives. This type of ACO is referred to as "Medicare Shared Savings Programs" or MSSP's. Ritner Medical Associates has been in a MSSP since 2014.
For more information about this ACO please click here: https://www.r-health.md/careisprimaryaco/
ACCO
Advanced Comprehensive Care Organization (ACCO) is a largely independent-provider based ACO that is focused on healthcare reform in 3 ways: better health, better care, and reducing costs for patients with chronic conditions. Ritner Medical joined ACCO in 2015. For more information click here: https://www.r-health.md/acco/
Our Commitment to You: Patient-Centered Care: NCQA Recognized PCMH Practice
In 2015, Ritner Medical Associates officially became a recognized Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) as recognized by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA). So, what does that mean for you? It means that we as a practice have committed to transforming to a model that concentrates on providing accessible care that is coordinated, continuous, comprehensive, and most importantly patient and family centered. The concepts behind the Patient Centered Medical Home model was developed in 1967 by the American Academy of Pediatrics, but it wasn't until the early 2000's when the existing Primary Care was struggling to survive that it was revisited and develop into an operational, measurable idea. Adoption into Primary Care over the past 16 years has been impressive with over 12,000 practices nationwide who have implemented this model in practice according to NCQA. Being a PCMH is a meaningful designation that identifies progressive-operating practices working to reduce the health care dollar by providing value instead of volume. We look forward everyday to evaluating and learning how to improve and keep leading the way in primary care. For more information regarding PCMH or NCQA click here: http://www.ncqa.org/programs/recognition/practices/patient-centered-medical-home-pcmh