North Carolina Patient Centered Medical Home Center

A Web-Based Technical Assistance Resource to Help North Carolina Physicians Improve the Quality and Efficiency of Care

Funded July 1, 2011, with a generous grant by the Pfizer Foundation, The North Carolina Patient Centered Medical Home Center (PCMHC) Technical Assistance Project is a NCMS Foundation-led project that links to and provides a wide range of web-based resource materials customized to meet the specific needs of North Carolina physicians. The Project resources are tailored to assist physicians in embracing patient centered medical home (PCMH) principles and policies in their practices.

The Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative defines PCMH as “an approach to providing comprehensive primary care for children, youth and adults. The PCMH is a health care setting that facilitates partnerships between individual patients, and their personal physicians, and when appropriate, the patient’s family.”

The PCMHC project is focused on helping the physician community respond effectively and appropriately to PCMH and accountable care organizations (ACO) provisions in the recently-passed federal health care reform law. The new federal law has several provisions that promote PCMH concepts that are designed to improve both the quality and efficiency of medical care. Information on Federal PCMH activities may be found at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

This technical assistance project represents an important statewide model to both inform and activate the private physician community to continue to improve the efficiency and quality of medical care delivered to patients. The project builds on the resources available through the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative that serves as a national resource and is also supported by the Pfizer Foundation. The proposed NCMS Foundations web-based educational and technical assistance effort will include:

  • Resources for analyzing the business case for PCMH interventions
  • A “toolbox” of programs and actions to reduce hospitalizations or other high utilization services
  • Providing training in process improvement techniques through NCMS Foundation’s PractEssentials program
  • Helping physician practices understand the value of developing patient registry and other systems (especially electronic health records) that track populations of patients

For more information, please contact Terri Gonzalez, Practice Technical Assistance Coordinator, North Carolina Medical Society Foundation at 919-833-3836 ext 123 or tgonzalez@ncmedsoc.org.

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Resources for more information on
PCMH in North Carolina.

NCQA offers free training for various phases of the Patient Centered Medical Home recognition process.  Practices can access the training calendar here.  These sessions offer workshops from start to finish on the PCMH survey tool.