American College of Physicians, CECity launch new quality improvement technology platform

A new partnership is set to provide expanded access to MedConcert, a new and innovative multi-tenant cloud-based platform for healthcare, designed to cost-effectively scale and spread continuous quality improvement and address key patient safety issues. The announcement of the alliance of The American College of Physicians (ACP) and CECity.com, Inc. (CECity) came at this week's 37th Annual Meeting of the Alliance for CME.

The strategic alliance is beginning with a diabetes pilot test in ACP state chapters. Working closely with internists and their practice teams, the pilot will test the full power of MedConcert to improve diabetic patient care processes and outcomes. Applications (Apps) will include ACP's innovative Medical Home Builder along with an automatically populated PQRS-based diabetes registry, patient survey tools, and a Facebook-like communication networking capability. In addition, pilot participants will have access to pay-for-performance and recertification opportunities.

Dr. Louis Diamond, MD, FACP, president of Quality Healthcare Consultants and adviser to the project, noted that, "As we continue the journey from a focus on performance measurement to improvement, we need a platform to link interventions to the specific identified gaps in care. Such a platform must be user friendly to individual healthcare professionals and teams, facilitate communications, and importantly, learning. Such a platform is MedConcert, powered by CECity, and the focus of this pilot".

Dr. Michael Barr, MD, MBA, FACP, senior vice president of the Division of Medical Professionalism, Practice & Quality at ACP adds, "ACP is very excited about this collaboration with CECity. MedConcert represents a truly innovative approach to engaging physicians and other health care professionals in meaningful quality improvement activities. This unique platform combines quality improvement tools with educational content, innovative graphics to highlight improvement opportunities and progress, and the ability to create networks of like-minded colleagues through its social networking features."

MedConcert provides healthcare providers and organizations access to a cost-effective, reusable platform in which Apps can be plugged in to address a wide variety of critical quality, safety and financial needs. Apps include patient surveys, clinical registries, quality reporting, population health management and coordination of care applications, to address issues such as reducing hospital readmissions through enhanced care coordination.

Using Web 2.0 social networking tools available within MedConcert, healthcare professionals and healthcare organizations are able to build secure communities of practice, which have been demonstrated to drive the quality improvement process. The platform provides professionals within these communities with access to communication and collaboration tools to support the sharing of best practices through learning and action networks, private messaging services that enable patient-centered care coordination across disparate systems, professional portfolios in support of Maintenance of Certification (MOC) and Continuing Medical Education (CME), and registry-based performance improvement solutions to help physicians better manage their practice and the health of their patient population.

"CECity is proud to partner with the ACP to launch MedConcert. Our goal is to connect health care professionals 'across walls' in a meaningful way to create communities of practice that enable care coordination, drive continuous performance improvement and encourage lifelong learning," said Simone Karp, RPh, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of CECity. "In this new era of patient-centered health care we need affordable, scalable innovations that allow all stakeholders to collaborate to achieve the "Triple Aim" for patients and that support the physician practice under new financial models, such as ACOs. We appreciate the opportunity to realize this vision in collaboration with the ACP through MedConcert."

Provided by American College of Physicians