FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 29, 2009

St. John’s Mercy Medical Group Practice First in Missouri
To Achieve NCQA Patient-Centered Medical Home Certification  

The St. John’s Mercy Medical Group pediatric practice of Daly-Wilson, Hunt, Regen, Rohatgi and Sakmar recently achieved certification by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) as a level one Physician Practice Connections ® – Patient-Centered Medical Home™ (PPC®-PCMH TM) – the first practice in Missouri to achieve the designation.

The NCQA standards are aligned with the joint principles of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American College of Physicians (ACP) and the American Osteopathic Association (AOA), which define the key characteristics of the patient-centered medical home.

According to the NCQA, the medical home is an approach that seeks to strengthen the patient-physician relationship by replacing episodic care with coordinated care and a long-term healing relationship. The AAFP, AAP, ACP, and AOA have defined the medical home as a model of care where each patient has an ongoing relationship with a personal physician who leads a team that takes collective responsibility for patient care. The physician-led care team is responsible for providing all the patient’s health care needs and, when needed, coordinating care across the health care system. A medical home also emphasizes enhanced care through open scheduling, expanded hours and communication between patients, physicians and staff. Many large health plans, as well as Medicare and Medicaid, are planning demonstration projects to learn more about how practices can become medical homes and the quality and cost advantages of doing so.

“St. John’s Mercy Medical Group has a long history of delivering high quality medical care, and we are proud to be the first in the state to receive this certification,” said Dr. John Zalewski, president of St. John’s Mercy Medical Group. “This certification by one of our pediatric practices takes us a step further in improving the care we deliver. As we refine this approach, we will assist more and more of our practices in obtaining certification. We prefer to lead in quality improvement, rather than to wait for others to tell us how to take better care of our patients.”

PPC®-PCMH TM includes nine standards for medical practices to meet, including use of patient self-management support, care coordination, evidence-based guidelines for chronic conditions and performance reporting and improvement. To be recognized as a patient-centered medical home, practices need to demonstrate the ability to sufficiently meet the criteria of these standards (i.e. achieve a minimum of 25 points out of 100 to attain the first of three levels of recognition) and specifically pass at least five of the following 10 elements:

• Written standards for patient access and patient communication
• Use of data to show standards for patient access and communication are met
• Use of paper or electronic charting tools to organize clinical information
• Use of data to identify important diagnoses and conditions in practice
• Adoption and implementation of evidence-based guidelines for three chronic conditions
• Active patient self-management support
• Systematic tracking of test results and identification of abnormal results
• Referral tracking, using a paper or electronic system
• Clinical and/or service performance measurement, by physician or across the practice
• Performance reporting, by physician or across the practice

NCQA is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality. NCQA accredits and certifies a wide range of health care organizations and recognizes physicians in key clinical areas. NCQA’s Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS®) is the most widely used performance measurement tool in health care.  NCQA is committed to providing health care quality information through the Web, media and data licensing agreements in order to help consumers, employers and others make more informed health care choices. For more information, visit http://www.ncqa.org/

St. John’s Mercy Medical Group (SJMMG) is a physician-governed group practice affiliated with St. John’s Mercy. SJMMG consists of 175 board-certified and board-eligible primary care and specialist physicians practicing in 65 locations throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area.

- ### -