NCQA approves second vendor for medical home recognition credit

Phytel, which provides cloud-based solutions related to population health management, has made an agreement with the National Committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA) that will help its clients achieve recognition as patient-centered medical homes. Under the pact with NCQA, physician groups that use Phytel's services can automatically meet certain medical home criteria.

Dallas-based Phytel is the second company--and the first non-EHR vendor--to gain NCQA backing in the medical home arena, according to a press release. Last summer, athenahealth, a Watertown, Mass., vendor of EHRs and revenue cycle management solutions, announced that it had undergone a corporate review by NCQA. The accreditation organization said users of athenahealth's PCMH accelerator program were "well-positioned" for medical home recognition.

NCQA performed a similar corporate review of Phytel to assess which of its services support NCQA's PCMH recognition process. The organization will use the results of that review to evaluate the compliance of practices with its PCMH requirements. Depending on how a practice uses Phytel's solution, it may earn a certain number of points toward medical home recognition.

Phytel automates population-wide patient monitoring and outreach, as well as care management, for physician practices and healthcare systems. Using data from practice management systems, EHRs and other sources, the company builds electronic patient registries. Clinical protocols are applied to those registries to generate messages to patients who need preventive or chronic care.

Phytel also offers applications that stratify patient populations according to identified health risks and create personalized, automated interventions; patient self-management programs that include health risk assessments and individualized online care plans; automated communications that follow a patient's hospital or ER discharges to help prevent unnecessary readmissions; and analytics that measure an organization's effectiveness in its quality improvement initiatives.

To learn more:
- read the press release
- see the Healthcare IT News story
- check out athenahealth's NCQA announcement