Benefits of PQA
PQA’s Data-Driven Model
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 become too expensive, wasteful, less patient-friendly, and often not evidence-based. Clinically integrated networks like PQA attack these problems by establishing quality goals and objectively measuring progress toward 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 how 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 defines 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.
Reducing Cost and Waste
Solving the Healthcare Problem
Patient Quality Alliance (PQA) seeks to curb uncontrolled costs and wasteful duplication of services resulting from fee-for-service healthcare practices and to establish a provider network comprised of all types and specialties across the entire continuum of care.
Present health care costs are not at sustainable levels. Payers and employers recognize that we can’t continue down this path. PQA is working to find ways of maintaining or improving the quality of care while reducing costs.
Targeting Waste and Unnecessary Cost
The Affordable Care Act shifts how providers are reimbursed for medical care from traditional fee-for-service models, where providers are paid for ordering services that may or may not effectively treat the condition.
Fee-for-service healthcare pays providers for doing more, whether the tests and interventions help or not. There are a lot of well-intended treatments that, when based on objective evidence, may not produce benefits for patients. PQA’s clinically integrated network gives associated providers the connective tools to really be accountable and only provide the most effective medical care.
By making data compiled by insurance companies available to providers within PQA’s network, best practice protocols can be established and adopted, enhancing the quality of care for patients.