PHILADELPHIA – Six Penn Medicine Clinical Care Associates (CCA) Internal Medicine and Family Medicine practices received level III certification, the highest designation granted, for their efforts to provide coordinated, efficient care through the Patient Centered Medical Home program (PCMH) operated by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).
The recognized Penn Medicine CCA practices include – Penn Family and Internal Medicine Lincoln, Penn Family and Internal Medicine Longwood, Penn Family Medicine New Garden, Penn Family Medicine Southern Chester County, Penn Family Medicine Unionville and Penn Primary Care and Integrative Medicine Whiteland.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System now features 30 practices with this designation. They include 24 CCA locations and six Clinical Practices of the University of Pennsylvania.
“These are high performing community practices, but also are spokes of a world-renowned academic medical center hub,” said Charles Orellana, MD, chief medical officer of CCA. “Thusly, these practices serve communities throughout the region by continuously utilizing information technology and other collaborative efforts to put patient care first.”
Orellana adds that these six Chester County practices in particular should get a lot of credit for everything they have tackled. It was only about two years ago that they joined CCA and Penn Medicine, and during that time, they had to convert their billing systems, integrate a new clinical electronic health record and transition into a new health care system. Developing new team based workflows and achieving PCMH recognition is a testament to their resilience and their steadfast commitment to improving the quality of patient care.
“This is a team effort from all involved – from providers, staff, practice management, and our patients – to work together to modernize primary care and ensure patients’ needs are met,” Orellana said. “Increasing the number of level III PCMH practices is a vital step forward in adapting to tomorrow’s health care challenges.”
The three-year designation comes from NCQA’s Physician Practice Connections—Patient-Centered Medical Home (PPC-PCMH) program, which uses evidence-based, patient-centered processes that focus on highly coordinated care and long-term medical professional-patient participatory relationships. The PMCH program strives to improve quality and efficiency of primary care by recognizing practices that support strong partnerships between patients and their clinicians, rather than looking at patient care solely as a series of office visits.
Research shows promising results in advancing quality of care and decreasing costs by expanding access to more efficient and coordinated care. In this model, clinician-led “medical home” teams deliver patient care and coordinate treatment across the health care system. The medical home clinicians at these Penn Medicine practices exhibit the “benchmarks of patient-centered care, including open scheduling, expanded hours, and appropriate use of proven health information systems,” according to the NCQA. In addition to improving the patient experience, this program helps avoid unneeded hospitalizations and emergency room visits, which can save money for payers, purchasers and patients.
For a complete list of primary care medical practices and clinicians receiving this NCQA honor, visit http://recognition.ncqa.org.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System’s patient care facilities stretch from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. These include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
Penn Medicine is an $11.1 billion enterprise powered by more than 49,000 talented faculty and staff.