The Larry A. Green Center for the Advancement of Primary Health Care for the Public Good was recently named a winner of the 2019 National Quality Forum (NQF) Annual Conference Innovator Abstracts Awards. Their work, presented as an abstract entitled A New Comprehensive Measure of High-Value Aspects of Primary Care, was selected as the winner in the Patient-Reported Outcomes category.

The Larry A. Green Center developed the measure with the support of the founding sponsor, the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) Foundation, and partners with the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) on use strategies and measure improvement. This includes testing and fielding the Person-Centered Primary Care Measure (PCPCM) within the ABFM hosted PRIME Registry.

The new Person-Centered Primary Care Measure (PCPCM) that the Green Center developed is based on extensive work with ~1,000 patients, clinicians and health care payers, followed by reliability and validity testing with > 2500 patients. The PCPCM uses 11 patient reported items to comprehensively assess aspects of care that may be responsible for high-value primary care including accessibility, comprehensiveness, continuity, integration, coordination, relationship, advocacy, family context, community context, health promotion, and goal-oriented care. The measure focuses attention and support on the integrating, personalizing, prioritizing functions that patients and clinicians say are important. Research suggests attention to these areas may reduce the de-personalization experienced by patients and the measurement burden, burnout and crisis of meaning experienced by clinicians.

Jill Shuemaker, RN, Clinician Measure Director for the ABFM’s Center for Professionalism & Value in Health Care, presented the abstract and received the award at NQF’s 20th anniversary 2019 National Conference last month in Washington, DC, on behalf of Rebecca Etz, PhD, Co-Director of The Larry A. Green Center. For 20 years, innovation in quality care has been a key area of focus for NQF. The invitation to submit abstracts allows novel and innovative approaches to advance the quality of patient care.

The Larry A. Green Center works to reclaim and reconstitute the intellectual foundations of primary care, to advance the science of medicine learned and practiced within layered and competing social frameworks of meaning, and to deliver on a now 50 year old promise: better health and improved health care through a synergistic focus on humanism and healing.

A full paper about the PCPCM will be published May 13 in the Annals of Family Medicine.*

* Etz RS, J. ZS, Gonzalez MM, Reves SR, O’Neal JP, Stange KC. A New Comprehensive Measure of High-Value Aspects of Primary Care. Ann Fam Med. 2019;17(3) (in press).