Measuring Family Physicians' Quality of Care: Will Patient Care Data Bring Value to Certification?

Description: The family medicine certification program ensures that family physicians are up to date with their clinical knowledge by assessing their medical knowledge with cognitive examination and knowledge self-assessment activities. While these assessments are the foundation of certification and distinguish physicians who meet a higher standard of medical knowledge, the quality of a physician's clinical care has not been considered as a part of certification.

Quality of care is measurable with electronic health record (EHR) data that capture key information of patient visits including patient demographics, diagnosis, tests, and procedures, etc. With curation (e.g., standardization and programming of the raw EHR data), patient care information can be quantified to determine a physician's performance on quality metrics.

The PRIME Registry launched by the American Board of Family Medicine in 2016 is the largest national Qualified Clinical Data Registry for Primary Care. It was established to provide family physicians and primary care clinicians with a faster and easier way to evaluate and improve practice performance and to reduce the burden of reporting for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services payment programs. The registry has fielded unique measures that were created by the Center for Professionalism and Value in Health Care to capture the core functions of primary care, including continuity of care, comprehensiveness, and patient-centeredness.

In this session, we plan to 1) provide an overview of the PRIME registry and its goals, 2) review the registry's 8-year operational history, 3) dig into the range of quality measures available, and 4) engage the audience in a discussion about the value and feasibility of using quality of care data to inform certification.