Updated as of January 22, 2016
- Virtual rostering assigns patients to the primary care physician that provided the highest dollar amount of services within a defined set of primary care services. Physicians in your team may not be aware of which patients have been virtually rostered to them and may erroneously think that these patients are not “their” patients. Hence, an individual physician’s sense of how many of the visits they provide are visits to “their” patients may be different than the rate shown in D2D.
- Visits to health care providers other than physicians are not included in this measure. However this does not necessarily skew the measure. For example, if a patient visits a primary care team 10 times and sees a physician 8 times, and each time it is their “own” physician, they will score 100% (8 out of 8) for “regular care provider – individual”. If, however, they visit 10 times, receiving care from multiple providers but only saw a physician once, they could still score 100% on this measure if the one visit to a physician was to their “own” physician.
- Efforts to improve access to same or next day appointments may result in patients seeing whichever physician is available for appointments at the time. While this may be valuable from the perspective of access, this process may be reflected in poor performance on the “regular care provider – individual” measure.
- Teams with part-time physicians and teaching teams may have developed strong relationships between physicians to jointly care for patients, such that patients may feel equally comfortable and familiar with more than one physician. However, while this might embody team-based care, it may be reflected in poor performance on the “regular care provider – individual” measure.
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