While EHRs lie at the heart of most scenarios for a digitized medical future, healthcare stakeholders must also keep tabs on developments taking place outside the usual EHR arena.

What other technological solutions, that is, will providers be able to utilize as they work to develop new, more efficient and effective healthcare delivery systems?

That question comes to mind with the recent announcement by Phytel, a technology company focused on population health improvement, that it has reached an agreement with the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) that will allow physician practices using Phytel's solutions to automatically meet certain NCQA requirements for recognition as a patient-centered medical home (PCMH).

As NCQA President Margaret O'Kane put it at the time of the announcement, "The patient-centered medical home is driving better, more affordable healthcare by improving the coordination of care and by fostering population health management. Phytel has taken a leadership role in helping physician practices develop the infrastructure for automating population health management and patient engagement in the PCMH setting.”

NCQA has completed a corporate review to identify which of Phytel's services support its 2011 PCMH recognition program. NCQA will use the results of its corporate review to assess compliance by practices that use Phytel's solution with its requirements for PCMH recognition. Depending on which Phytel services are deployed, a practice can automatically receive a specified number of points toward achieving recognition as a medical home.

Phytel’s automated care management suite includes a wide range of solutions that help practices build PCMHs that satisfy NCQA's 2011 criteria. Among these services are protocol-driven registries that automatically identify care gaps and trigger messages to patients for recommended care; applications that stratify patient populations according to identified health risks and create personalized, automated interventions; and patient self-management programs that include health risk assessments and individualized online care plans.

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