Contact:
Will SansomPhone: (210) 567-2579
E-mail:
Sansom@uthscsa.edu The department of family and community medicine at the Health Science Center is leading the national evaluation project of an intervention designed to transform how primary care is delivered across the country.
The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that supports health care issue research, awarded the Health Science Center $263,658 to evaluate the American Academy of Family Physicians’ (AAFP) practice redesign initiative, called TransforMED. This grant supplements an earlier contract for $864,329 from the AAFP to the Health Science Center to support the assessment of TranforMED.
Carlos R. Jaén, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of the department of family and community medicine and holder of the Dr. John M. Smith Jr. Professorship at the Health Science Center, said: “The Commonwealth Fund grant will enable us to evaluate TransforMED from the perspective of patients. This is important because current efforts to improve practice often rely on technology-only solutions and pay little attention to how the changes impact patient-centered care.”
The TransforMED Model of Care includes these elements:
• Patient-centered care
• Whole-person orientation
• Team approach to care
• Elimination of barriers to access; open access by patients
• Advanced information systems, including electronic health records
• Redesigned, more functional offices
• Focus on quality and safety
“We are asking the 36 practices nationwide that are participating in TransforMED to radically change the way they deliver care,” said Dr. Jaén, the grant principal investigator. “Many of the changes are designed help them change from physician-centered practices to patient-centered practices. Now we will be able to measure the changes.”
The Center for Research in Primary Care and Family Medicine, a consortium of family medicine researchers from Case Western Reserve University, the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Lehigh Valley Hospital and the University of Colorado will collaborate with Dr. Jaén on qualitative data analysis and real-time learning about the change processes.
Final reports will be released in early 2009, although the project sites and primary care community will benefit from key lessons learned from the project on an ongoing basis.
A 2006 study by ABC News, the Kaiser Family Foundation and USA TODAY indicated that more than half of Americans (54 percent) are dissatisfied with the quality of medical care they receive. Seventeen percent of patients reported dissatisfaction with ability to get appointments.
