Benefits of Patient Quality Alliance

physician with stethoscope

Traditionally, healthcare providers worked in isolation, treating patients without feedback data to support their methodology. This can be a problem when a provider adopts a particular treatment process or model and fails to examine and re-examine its efficacy in the broader patient population.

Patient Quality Alliance aims to redirect such practices using data gathered across its ever-growing network of more than 400 providers to establish evidence-based best practice guidelines across the healthcare continuum.

PQA is transforming healthcare toward value. Healthcare has gotten too expensive, too wasteful, less patient friendly, and it is often not evidence based. Clinically integrated networks like PQA attack these problems by establishing quality goals and objectively measuring progress towards those goals using data.

Data-driven approaches allow each provider to compare outcome statistics against similar data collected throughout the network. This allows them to analyze their practice’s efficiency and efficacy and make meaningful improvements in the way they deliver care.

Filling the Gaps

But PQA’s vision doesn’t stop there. Even with protocols for best practices in place, patients may face transportation or accessibility issues that prevent them from receiving critical primary care. Readily accessible admissions data identifies patients who go to emergency rooms for medical conditions that should be handled by primary care providers, so PQA can now reach out and help these patients access more-appropriate, less-costly medical care.

Additionally, the data-driven approach reduces wasteful, duplicated services. A patient with low back problems may see multiple providers for treatment. If providers don’t have access to each other’s patient records, expensive tests, such as magnetic resonance imaging scans, may be reordered unnecessarily when they have just been performed elsewhere. This runs up medical costs with no benefit to the patient.

PQA is defining what quality means in healthcare. Physicians are coming together with Portneuf Medical Center to take on the challenges of out-of-control healthcare inflation and unnecessary poor quality. Physicians in the PQA network are committed to improving the quality of care by holding themselves accountable to provide optimal outcomes.

From Portnef Medical Center HealthWise publication, Winter 2015.