Results Across our EMR-Based Partner Practices

Figures 13 – 17 summarize the achievement of our 30 EMR-based partner practices on Better Health’s Summary Standards for Outcomes and Processes. Target achievement for the five component standards of our Summary Outcome Standard, and the four component standards of our Summary Process Standard, are described in Part 1 of this Community Health Checkup. They represent nationally endorsed quality measures that we seek to improve, in partnership with our patients and other stakeholders. As described in Part Two, our long-term goal is perfection – 100% – on both Summary Standards. Our partner practices achieve good results when compared with national benchmarks for diabetes – across all nationally reported insurance categories and among our uninsured patients. However, all reporting practices have room to improve on Better Health’s more challenging targets.

The following graphs show our results, first over all insurance categories and then within insurance categories. Each section first “sorts” our 30 practices alphabetically, and then by rank order for each Summary Standard. Results of practices with fewer than 50 eligible diabetic patients in an insurance category are not reported. Thus, more practices are listed in the overall reports than for reports within insurance categories. For Medicaid and uninsured patients, for example, only eight and 10 practices qualify for reporting, respectively.

“Top practices” are identified as those whose achievement on a given Summary Standard is high among the reporting practices; that is, they reflect the top level of achievement. These practices will share their approaches and insights with other practices in Better Health’s Learning Collaborative, with the expectation that all practices and their patients may learn and improve. We make no effort to report tests of statistical significance or to identify lowest achieving practices. We believe that the practices reporting here have taken a bold step towards perfection and that all practices can improve.