Dear Colleagues,
We have been periodically covering the 10 building blocks of high-performance primary care practices. As you will recall, the first building block is engaged leadership and the second is data-driven improvement. Today I’d like to address the third building block, empanelment.
Empanelment requires that every patient in your practice is linked to a primary care clinician or primary care team. Empanelment is essential for creating the continuity of relationship that enables successful therapeutic endeavors. Empanelment also enables your practice to determine the appropriate panel size for each clinician. When panels get too big, access issues arise, patient satisfaction goes down, and urgent care and emergency room visits go up. And finally, empanelment allows for accurate determination of which patients belong in each clinician’s denominator for cost and quality metrics.
Best practices for empanelment are to use required fields in your EMR to assign each patient to a clinician or team. The first question anyone should ask a patient interacting with the practice is not some variation of “how can I help you” or “what do you need to be seen for” but “who do you normally see here” or “who is your primary care clinician”.
If you would like help with empanelment, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
All the best,
Tim Dudley, MD
Medical Director
