Primary care is your first stop to getting healthy and staying healthy. Your primary care physician gets to know you, your family and develops an ongoing relationship with you to help you maintain an overall healthy lifestyle. In 2008, two Community Care Physicians' practices, Schodack Internal Medicine and Pediatrics and Latham Medical Group, joined CDPHP's medical home pilot program called Enhanced Primary Care Program (formerly CDPHP Patient Centered Medical Home program) to help revitalize the field of primary care. The Enhanced Primary Care Program (EPC) is one insurance company's initiative to better serve its population of subscribers. EPC implements changes in the office to improve processes for better patient care. Since its inception, eight additional Community Care Physicians' practices* have worked to reform their practices, focusing on improving satisfaction, efficiencies (such as reducing unnecessary visits to the ER and overutilization of testing) and quality of care. Efficiencies are measured by the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and information Set (HEDIS), a tool used by more than 90 percent of America's health plans to measure performance on important dimensions of care and service. The goal of the medical home is to improve access to care, coordinate patient care so it's seamless between practices, hospitals and specialists and improve staff and patient experience.
Practices enrolled in the Enhanced Primary Care Program need to utilize an Electronic Health Record, a system that Community Care Physicians implemented in 2005 (first multispecialty group to implement a fully integrated electronic health record companywide), as well as achieved National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) Level III Medical Home Recognition. NCQA is a program that aims to improve primary care by setting standards that describe clear and specific criteria and measuring how well practices are organizing care around patients based on the medical home model. Community Care Physicians was the first multispecialty medical group in the Capital Region to receive this recognition across its primary care practices. Read more about Community Care's NCQA recognition here.
*Practices included in CDPHP's Enhanced Primary Care Program are Schodack Internal Medicine and Pediatrics (phase 1), Latham Medical Group (phase 1), Community Care Family Medicine (phase 2), Clifton Park Family Medicine (phase 2), Albany Family Practice Group (phase 2), Burnt Hills Pediatrics and Internal Medicine (phase 3), Community Care Pediatrics-Saratoga (phase 3), The Office of Dr. Lev Barats (phase 3).