Aviano's medical home ranks supreme

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Jessica Hines
  • 31st Fighter Wing Public Affairs
AVIANO AIR BASE, Italy --  The 31st Medical Group's family practice teams were ranked the number one patient-centered medical home in the Air Force for fiscal year 2013's third quarter.

What may seem as a small quarterly accomplishment comes with great pride for the medical group only a few short years after the Air Force adopted the PCMH model for transforming primary care practices into medical homes.

According to Maj. Michael O'Keefe, 31st MDG family nurse practitioner, the PCMH model was first implemented in the civilian sector.

"They were seeing decreased patient satisfaction. The family practice physicians were having a hard time as well and had very little job satisfaction. It was all about how many patients they saw," he said.

Beginning in 2010, the Air Force began implementing the medical-home concept, focusing on the patient-physician relationship through the use of medical teams and giving a sense of familiarity within the practice.

"It's all about the patient experience," said O'Keefe. "You're seeing the same person and you don't have to come in and repeat the same thing over and over, which has increased patient satisfaction rates."

According to O'Keefe, it's not just working in the Air Force, but all over other Department of Defense branches as well.

For the 31st MDG, the medical center is divided into two teams. Specifically, Team Roma and Team Venezia are each comprised of a medical doctor, a mid-level provider (nurse practitioner, physician's assistant or general medical officer), one nurse and four to five technicians.

Both teams strive to take the primary care experience to the next level and often times go far beyond what patients see on a day-to-day basis.

"Sometimes, patients will come in and they will only see us for a couple of minutes, and they think that's it," said O'Keefe. "But, in reality there is a lot of behind the scenes work going on.

"When we do our team huddles the day before, we go over the next day's appointments and talk about who needs what. Our technicians actually go into the appointment and preload things and prescreen the patient. By the time I walk into the room, I will have already gone through what the technicians preload and talked with them so that I'm not asking you 50 million of the exact same questions," he added.

While the medical group has seen great success with the PCHM model, they decided to take a closer look at the statistics for their patient care and see where they could improve after coming in at ninth and eighth places from previous quarters.

"What really triggered our success to number one was we focused on our HEDIS metrics," said O'Keefe.

HEDIS, referring to the Healthcare Effectiveness Data Information Set, measures the effectiveness of medical services and providers throughout the United States using statistical analysis, field testing and customer feedback.

"Our health care integrator, Capt. Monica Beebe and I, sat down with our metrics and we found that four of the eight major graded areas talked a lot about our routine care patients, specifically diabetics," he said. "Essentially, our patients weren't coming in for their routine care, and we took a big hit for that."

O'Keefe and Beebe took to the phone lines and began contacting individuals directly to schedule them for their visits and ensured they were caught up on vital care.

"The metrics showed us where we needed to improve, and we took that very seriously. We went down the list and whoever needed something, they got called," said O'Keefe.

While reports and metrics are only a small part of the 31st MDG success, O'Keefe points to one specific area that makes it all worth the effort.

"The most important thing to me is this right here," said O'Keefe pointing to the patient satisfaction statistics for Aviano, which happen to be above 90 percent.

"Getting graded at number one doesn't mean anything if that's not as high as it can be," he said. "It's a lot of hard work from a wide variety of folks at all levels, we might be number one, but we've got a lot of help from all of our coworkers. It's a great place to work."