NCQA Approves Use of Phytel Solutions to Meet Medical Home Criteria

Phytel, the leader in physician-led population health improvement, announced today that it has reached an agreement with the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) that will allow physician practices using Phytel's solutions to automatically meet certain NCQA requirements for recognition as a patient-centered medical home (PCMH). Phytel is the first non-EHR vendor—and only the second company—with which NCQA has made this kind of arrangement.

NCQA has completed a corporate review to identify which of Phytel's services support its 2011 PCMH recognition program. Future reviews will be conducted as Phytel introduces more products and features aligned with the NCQA PCMH 2011 standards.

NCQA will use the results of its corporate review to assess compliance by practices that use Phytel's solution with its requirements for PCMH recognition. Depending on which Phytel services are deployed, a practice can automatically receive a specified number of points toward achieving recognition as a medical home.

"The patient-centered medical home is driving better, more affordable healthcare by improving the coordination of care and by fostering population health management," said NCQA President Margaret O'Kane. "Phytel has taken a leadership role in helping physician practices develop the infrastructure for automating population health management and patient engagement in the PCMH setting. We will be confident that groups who have incorporated certain Phytel services into their standard care management processes will meet our corresponding recognition criteria."

Steve Schelhammer, CEO of Phytel, commented, "NCQA has been a key player in the nationwide efforts to support the transformation of primary care practices toward patient-centered medical homes that coordinate patient care and engage patients in managing their own conditions. We are very pleased to be able to tell our clients and prospective clients that their use of Phytel's solutions can directly contribute to their efforts to achieve NCQA PCMH recognition."

"Being able to get automatic credit for using Phytel will be a huge plus," said Frank Floyd, MD, associate medical director of UHS Medical Group, a Binghamton, N.Y.-based practice in which 120 providers are using Phytel's registry-based patient outreach program. "By removing the need for sending in supporting documentation, it will streamline the process for medical home recognition. With the help of Phytel, some of our sites have already received NCQA approval as either Level 1 or Level 3 medical homes, and it will be even simpler to apply for this recognition in the future."

Phytel’s automated care management suite runs on its SaaS-based Atmosphere^TM platform and includes a wide range of solutions that help practices build PCMHs that satisfy NCQA's 2011 criteria. Among these services are protocol-driven registries that automatically identify care gaps and trigger messages to patients for recommended care; applications that stratify patient populations according to identified health risks and create personalized, automated interventions; patient self-management programs that include health risk assessments and individualized online care plans; automated communications that follow a patient's hospital or ER discharges to help prevent unnecessary readmissions; and sophisticated analytics that measure an organization's effectiveness in its quality improvement initiatives.

About Phytel

The premier company empowering physician-led population health improvement, Phytel provides physicians with proven technology to deliver timely, coordinated care to their patients. Phytel's state-of-the-art registry, which now encompasses 20 million patients nationwide, uses evidence-based chronic and preventive care protocols to identify and notify patients due for service, while tracking compliance and measuring quality and financial results. For more information, please visit www.phytel.com. Follow us on Twitter and find us on Facebook.

About the National Committee for Quality Assurance

NCQA is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality. NCQA accredits and certifies a wide range of health care organizations. It also recognizes clinicians and practices in key areas of performance. NCQA’s Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS®) is the most widely used performance measurement tool in health care. NCQA is committed to providing health care quality information for consumers, purchasers, health care providers and researchers.