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When you redesign a practice around these principles, you can step off the productivity treadmill and focus on excellent patient care.
If you are like most primary care physicians, you probably have had enough of third parties injecting themselves into the front lines of medical care in ways that offer marginal value and drive up costs. Pre-authorization requirements, productivity benchmarks, competing clinical guidelines and pay-for-performance initiatives are just a few of the challenges we face as primary care physicians.
What can we do to return the locus of control to our practices and ensure adequate compensation for our work? We have to redesign our practices to optimize efficiency and show that we can not only deliver superb care but also lower the total cost of health care. The "ideal medical practice" model can move us closer to this goal.
This article shares what we have learned to date as part of a national collaborative project designed to demonstrate the viability of the ideal medical practice model. It also launches a series of articles that will delve more deeply into the essential components of ideal medical practices.
What is an ideal medical practice?
What do you get when you mix low overhead with high technology and wrap it around an excellent physicianpatient relationship? You get an ideal medical practice - a practice model designed to enhance doctor-patient relationships, increase face-to-face time between doctors and patients, reduce physician workloads, instill patients with a sense of responsibility for their health and cut wasted dollars from the entire system.1,2 The model encompasses the ideal micro practice model, which focuses on optimizing the smallest functional work unit capable of delivering excellent care: the solo doctor, even without any staff.3 The key principles ideal medical practices pursue are high-quality, patient-centered, collaborative care; unfettered access and continuity; and extreme efficiency. (See "The mark of an IMP," below.) It is consistent with the AAFP's "new model of care" and the patient-centered medical home (see the related article on page 38).
In 2006, we began work on a national collaborative project, with support from the Physician's Foundation for Health Systems Excellence, to measure the outcomes of ideal medical practices and to demonstrate that motivated primary care physicians can adopt the tools and...