TAFP members participate in national quality improvement project

Fifteen practices in Cease Smoking Today (CS2Day) completed 12 months of work in the California Academy of Family Physicians’ tobacco-cessation quality improvement project with a graduation ceremony held in Austin, Texas in October 2009. The CS2Day collaboratory was a national project in conjunction with California and four other state chapters of AAFP—Texas, Georgia, Ohio, and West Virginia—and 15 practice teams (three from each state). Family physician graduates dedicated their time, expertise, and resources to ensure they were providing the highest quality of care for their smoking patients and using a chronic disease registry to capture their improvement data.

A full year of collaboratory work included a face-to-face learning session to launch the project in Chicago in October 2008. Following the first learning session were 11 virtual learning sessions on topics that included pharmacotherapy, registry functionality and population management, office process mapping, youth and tobacco, and motivational interviewing. All practices arrived in Austin for a final graduation session with faculty members who presented on team-based care in the primary care setting and on the patient-centered medical home, and how team participation in the quality improvement project will give practices an edge to becoming medical homes. Particular attention to technology, specifically the use of an EHR/registry (e-prescribing, fax-prescribing, virtual office visits, e-mail) and population-based care, were of interest to the practice teams. The two speakers at the graduation were TAFP President-elect Melissa Gerdes, M.D., and TAFP Board member Janet Hurley, M.D., both of Whitehouse.

The three Texas teams who participated were Jefferson Street Family Practice of Austin with Ajay Gupta, M.D., Village Health Partners of Plano with John Moon, M.D., and Lonestar Medical of New Braunfels with Jay Gruhlkey, M.D.