This is my first Conference on Practice Improvement meeting and it was a great Pre-conference day. For those who are not familiar, this is organized by the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine and the American Academy of Family Physicians and the location of this year's meeting is in Greenville, South Carolina.
The highlight for me was a Pre-conference session talking about practice transformation and clinical innovation. Of course, there were concepts on the Patient Centered Medical Home talked about, but there was so much more. Being at the grassroots, it's difficult to see the big picture, because I'm just trying to keep up with day-to-day office duties, like keeping up with my electronic medical record.
But, it was great to see a presentation kind of put everything together from "Who is in your medical neighborhood" to "This is how you use data driven care to improve the quality of your patient care." I have never really had the time to dive into my own EMR and explore its full functionality and do things like find trends in clinical numbers or use the EMR as a patient registry to remind myself of preventative maintenance issues.
Dr. Bruce Bagley from TransforMED.com introduced an entirely new webpage on the AAFP website having to do with Risk Stratified Care Management. This asks you, "How can you formally figure out which patients are going to require more of your time & attention and your staff's time & attention?" We kind of do this already informally, but what is very exciting is this chart which puts this concept in an organized format.
Day Two of the conference is today and is highlighted by main stage speaker Christine Bechtel whose talk is entitled "Patient Centered Care: What is it and how do we get there?" You can follow along on twitter with the #CPI12 hashtag. I'm also going to try to record video interviews during the conference. Stay tuned for more updates!