WIHI: Coaching’s the Thing for Primary Care Practice

​Date: May 20, 2010

Featuring:

• Ann Lefebvre, MSW, CPHQ, Associate Director, North Carolina Area Health Education Centers Program
• Neil Baker, MD, IHI Faculty and Improvement Advisor, and Improvement Consultant
• Cory B. Sevin, RN, MSN, NP, Director, Institute for Healthcare Improvement
• Roger Chaufournier, CEO, CSI Solutions

 

Primary care practice in the US is undergoing a transformation. In many instances the offices still look cramped and, unlike hospitals, the changes don’t take the form of major new construction. But look closely: those sagging shelves of patient files are giving way to electronic health records; practitioners are tapping into online expertise to help with diagnoses and apply evidence-based medicine; patients have their own web portals; and people with similar chronic conditions sometimes meet as a group with a single provider for shared learning and greater efficiency. And, in case you haven’t heard, health care reformers are looking to primary care like never before to pave a better path to prevention, continuity of care, and cost containment for the country as a whole. Could the expectations be any higher?

 

Maybe so — don’t forget the medical home, which is why the newest kid on the block is something called the Primary Care Coach: someone specially trained to help office practices make sense of all these ambitions AND the successful and meaningful use of health information technology.

 

WIHI host Madge Kaplan welcomes a panel of experts, each of whom is now engaged in one way or another with leading the redesign of primary care. In addition to learning more about coaches for primary care, hear about the innovative Health Information Technology Regional Extension Centers (RECs) now popping up across the US to help office practices adopt electronic health records. One key goal of all the current efforts is to make sure technology is used in service of healthy outcomes and quality improvement, and not the other way around.