What to Expect at PCMH Congress 2019

Christina Borden, director for recognition programs, policy, and resources at NCQA, provides an overview of what to expect at PCMH Congress 2019 including issues around social determinants of health and health disparity, and NCQA programs.

Podcast Transcript:

I’m Christina Borden, the director for recognition programs, policy, and resources at NCQA. I've been with NCQA for over 10 years now, focused specifically on the patient-centered programs, which include patient-centered medical home, as well as specialty practice programs and various other offshoots of the patient-centered approaches to care in different settings.

The progress is really the culmination of focusing on PCMH, but also looking towards those opportunities where we can address how patient-centeredness can be focused on in other settings, such as ambulatory settings, school-based, medical homes, how behavioral health is a big part of that as well, and is becoming a focus for many entities, many states, as well as the federal government, and how practices can really use best practices to approach those tough issues with their patients.

My team specifically at NCQA is focused on maintaining the requirements of the PCMH standards for NCQA. We have a fun job of doing interpretation of all those standards and really being the subject matter experts when it comes to those 2R programs that address patient-centered care.

We also look at the different eligibility requirements of our programs. Then we are under the product development side, so we get to also look towards the future of what our role could be like in a couple of years, with introducing potentially new programs or what the health care landscape in general will look like for patient-centered care.

There's many different sessions happening at congress this year. I think it's heavy. You can get really excited about not only the opportunities to share what they've been doing, or be able to hopefully meet other individuals that might have good ideas for how they can better approach patient-centered care within their practice or within the organization that is supporting primary care practices.

I think there's this culmination of folks coming from very different fields, from electronic health records, to actual primary care settings, to really create great ideas for what the future might look like for patient-centered care.

We also will be focusing on issues around social determinants of health and health disparity, looking at the NCQA programs and how practices have approached coming through for recognition, and addressing the new model of the annual reporting or annual review process piece to show that there's some stating their recognition.

Also, with regards to NCQA programs, maybe how practices have approached the new way of demonstrating evidence around the virtual check-in. That's an exciting precog session that we have slotted out, that we have folks attending to talk about strategies for practices when it comes to that documentation review, as well as demonstration of virtual evidence.

I'm really excited to be a part of this congress and be a part of the steering committee, because this really puts my work in place.

I get to actually interact with all those folks that have been utilizing the NCQA standards, believe in the patient-centered medical home model, and are excited about focusing on patient-centered care. It makes me feel that what I do every day is making an impact.

It just also gives me a wealth of knowledge and a wealth of understanding of what folks are doing in the field that I can bring back to our teams at NCQA to either help support the direction going forward with patient-centered care, or be able to develop tools or programs that keep in contemporary with what's happening what we're hearing out from the field as well.

I'm excited to be with all of you in these hearing sessions and learn and engage with everybody at the company.