The new "quality" push mainly refers to the measurement of the systems
that manage recall and complex illness. It does not measure the
management of acute episodes that we are used to seeing. Our systems to
manage complex illness over time are not so good.
Many factors could affect a practice's "perfomance" - some are outside
the practice' control. Patients are free to go wherever they like. Our
history data is imcomplete.
When I looked at our immunization data some years ago, it was pretty poor.
However we have a large mobile population - some of our SWPEs gave their
address in Victoria!. The measures are open to "gaming" eg make sure
your initial figures are pretty poor so you can show a significant
improvement - send your problem patients to someone else.
R
Greg Markey wrote:
Now there's a thought...we must begin referring our delinquent
patients to another practice to improve our figures. G
My practice is extremely keen to see how we are doing compared to other
practices.
Finding out that we are doing worse than the median would strongly
motivate us to do better. Finding out that we are doing better than the
median would be a very powerful marketing tool for our practice. We
could say in our practice brochure things like (depending on what was
found in the comparison between us and other practices):
"Patients in our practice have lower cholesterol, blood sugar and blood
pressure, fewer heart attacks and strokes, less cancer and are healthier
overall than patients in most other practices in the area."
Oliver Frank, general practitioner
255 North East Road, Hampstead Gardens
South Australia 5086
Ph. 08 8261 1355 Fax 08 8266 5149
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