MA PCMH Eval Week: Christine Johnson on Self-Assessment Medical Home Transformation Tools

Greetings. I am Christine Johnson, the Director of Transformation and Quality Improvement for the Patient Centered Medical Home Initiative (PCMHI). I am from the University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Center for Health Policy and Research. Today’s post shares how using self-assessment medical home transformation tools with primary care practices can help practices self-evaluate throughout the transformation process and provide data for the evaluation team.

Medical home transformation involves multiple stakeholders: health insurance payers, practices, policy makers and those providing transformation technical assistance. When practices complete the same tool and then share their results, multiple stakeholders can literally be on the same page with a similar understanding of what has been done, what needs to be done, and identifying gaps. Self-assessment tools can be tailored to your individual project’s goals, or standardized tools can be used ‘as is’.

Hot Tips:

  • Use tools to monitor progress and design technical assistance. Not only do the results from the transformation tools support practices to track and monitor their practice redesign, they allow technical assistance and practice staff to discuss any differences in their perception of the practice change efforts and can be a key resource for designing further technical assistance.
  • Utilize health insurance payers as stakeholders. Payers can see progress being made that is often intangible and support the practices in building the necessary foundation that will eventually lead to clinical performance improvement.
  • Administer self-assessment tools multiple times throughout a project to highlight small, but encouraging, changes.

Lessons Learned: Self-assessment tools can:

  • Establish a practice’s baseline
  • Enable practices to understand where they are in their transformation compared to other practices
  • Guide and structure practices’ transformation, particularly if the transformation tool has both an actual and expected project status over time
  • Allow technical assistance staff to step in early to support practices that are struggling in their transformation

Hot Tip: Save yourself and the practices the time of developing and testing a new tool. Take a look at the growing number of tools already available (see links below) rather than creating your own.

Hot Tip: Once practices have some experience using a self-assessment tool, ask practices who are finding the tool useful and are successfully accomplishing their PCMH transformation to present to the other practices either via a conference call or a webinar.

There are no “perfect” on-line assessments but our team suggests:

Qualis Site landing page

Transformation practice self-assessment tool

Medical Home Index

TransforMED MHIQ

Rad Resource: Measuring Medical Homes

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Massachusetts Patient-Centered Medical Home Initiative (PCMHI) week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from members who work with the Massachusetts Patient-Centered Medical Home Initiative (PCMHI). Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. 

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