EVANSTON, Ill. – Dec. 5, 2006 - American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) and Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) recently co-sponsored Assessing and Improving Patient Care, part of a continuing conference series on the core competencies for physician practice and the evaluation of physician practice performance. This year’s conference emphasized the importance of developing programs and systems to evaluate, learn and incorporate specific improvement tactics in clinical and hospital practice.

“We had a wonderful turnout for this conference, with more than 100 participants representing medical educators and credentialers interested in teaching, assessing and improving patient care,” said Sheldon D. Horowitz, MD, senior vice president at ABMS. “Attendees heard a number of presentations by physicians actively involved in furthering the message of improving the quality of patient care. They were then asked to share the types of systems they are creating for improving patient care and for evaluating the tools to assess patient care.”

A poster session on the opening evening of the event showcased more than 30 projects by physicians and researchers from around the country. Some of the research topics involved examining the tools to assess the quality of patient care, determining processes for practice performance improvement, implementing systems and tactics to redesign a practice and using incentives to improve patient care.

Keynote speaker, Elizabeth McGlynn PhD, MPP, associate director, RAND Health opened the conference with a talk on Evaluating Physician Performance on Effectiveness and Efficiency Metrics. Dr. McGlynn, a nationally known expert on methods for assessing and reporting on quality of healthcare delivery, reported on the advances that have been made in measuring and reporting on quality at the physician practice level (either individually or in large groups). McGlynn said that American adults receive only about one-half of the recommended care and that the number drops considerably when it comes to care for geriatric conditions. She said that while there are good tools available, the information that is gathered can be difficult to interpret and often leads to different answers to the same questions. “There are a number of methodological issues that arise in creating efficiency and effectiveness scores at the physician level,” explained McGlynn. “We need to better understand the implications of these methodological choices however, while feedback loops and data quality improvement is essential, the world isn’t going to wait for us to get the methods perfect.”

Following an introductory presentation on assessing patient care of practicing physicians by Diane M. Hartmann, MD, associate professor at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and associate dean for Graduate Medical Education at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and F. Daniel Duffy, MD senior advisor to the president, American Board of Internal Medicine, attendees considered strategies for how to implement assessment of patient care processes into the education and evaluation activities of residents and practicing physicians. The session concluded with a talk and powerful video presentation by Darren A. DeWatt, MD, MPH, assistant professor of Medicine, University of North Carolina, on how literacy and communication initiatives play a significant role in improving patient care.

During the small group breakout sessions which followed a panel discussion led by Charles M. Kilo, MD, MPH, chief executive officer, GreenField Health and Ed H. Wagner, MD, MPH, director at MacColl Institute for Healthcare Innovation, Group Health Cooperative Center for Health Studies, attendees concentrated on creating models for improving patient care and establishing systems of improvement across the continuum.
Information shared at the conferences has often served as a stimulus to develop various programs and tools for physician and practice enrichment. One such program, ABMS Patient Safety Improvement Program, was demonstrated to conference attendees. The Web-based course, which will be made available to certified physicians from all 24 ABMS Member Boards in the spring, focuses on providing essential knowledge about safety and on applying the skills learned to their own environment. Physicians completing the program receive CME credit that satisfies Maintenance of Certification Part IV: Practice Performance Assessment requirements (or Part II: Lifelong Learning and Self-Assessment for non-practicing physicians) based on each Member Board’s criteria.

The results of conference discussions, along with poster session abstracts and speakers’ presentations, are available on the ABMS Web site at www.abms.org.

Past ABMS-ACGME conferences on the core competencies have focused on medical knowledge, interpersonal communication skills, professionalism, practice-based learning and improvement and systems-based practice.