6 steps to ensure patients don’t miss chronic or preventive care

Panel management, or population health management, equips physicians and their teams with techniques to monitor their patient populations so they can provide necessary preventive and chronic care to all patients, regardless of their visit frequency. “Population health management, I think, is best used to identify opportunities and then you know where to put your efforts to develop different policies, or different patient flows or different visit frequencies to close those gaps and provide better care,” said Wisconsin internal medicine physician Richard Fossen, MD. “Maybe it’s a provider who has a large diabetic population, or maybe it’s a provider who has a large female population—what’s important to them?” said Ann Gilbertson, a clinical quality innovation nurse at the same clinic as Dr. Fossen. “[Panel management] not only increased the satisfaction of the provider’s practice but it increased the quality of care for the patient.” A free online module in the AMA’s STEPS Forward collection shows you how to implement panel management in your practice. Visit the module to get an in-depth look at what this looks like in practice—but first, read these six steps to panel management. 1.  Develop a registry. A registry is a database with medical information about immunizations, cancer screenings and disease-specific lab results for the patients in your practice. You can search the registry to identify patients who are overdue for mammograms...
Source: AMA Wire - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Source Type: news