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Residency clinics should give patients the option to choose a care team that is under the direction of a staff or supervising physician. The personal clinician would not be a resident because the resident will no longer be associated with the clinic when their residency ends.
The practice should set its own goal for continuity of patient visits with their selected primary care provider or care team and then monitor that percentage to evaluate its performance. The practice should set goals such as by percentage, number of visits, etc. for the frequency patients should be seeing their selected provider and then monitor to see how frequent they are meeting their goal. The practice should provide its report including the rate of visits for patients with their provider including the goal established.
Yes. The requirement is met if the response time is documented when a patient submits an electronic request for clinical advice and the practice communicates to patients that an on-call provider is available to address urgent issues by telephone after hours. Practices must have a documented process for addressing electronic advice and telephone advice; for this criterion, practices may submit a report tracking response times to electronic requests for at least seven days during operating hours and after hours.
Practices define “timely” advice after considering the needs of their population. Practices must submit their written policy for responding to calls and e-mails, which may categorize the types of requests and appropriate response times.
Practices must also monitor and demonstrate their documented process defining response times to a nonurgent message and a report summarizing response times.
Documentation may be a screen shot demonstrating system capability. This could be multiple screenshots (one of the Web portal page and screenshots for each item) or one screenshot showing evidence of multiple capabilities required (requesting medication refills, appointments and requesting a referral or test) on an active website. Practices are also encouraged to demonstrate these capabilities with their evaluator during their virtual check-in.
No. Walk-in appointments are different from scheduled same-day appointments. Same-day appointments offer patients the opportunity to schedule a routine or urgent visit at a specific time to enable more patient-centered and convenient access; this prevents the need to wait for the next available clinician at the clinic.
Yes, members of the clinical staff (including clinicians and nurses) providing clinical care to patients (based on pertinent licensing laws) may be scheduled for an alternative appointment with a patient. These appointments are in place of those scheduled in the physical office and provided by telephone or other technology supported mechanisms. Visits with social workers, nutritionists, educators or pharmacists alone without an accompanying staff member administering clinical care would not meet the intent of the criterion.
No. Tobacco use is an unhealthy behavior and is not considered a behavioral health condition. Practices need to identify behavioral health-related criteria pertinent to their specific patient population, which could include other (non-tobacco-related) substance use treatment, a behavioral health diagnosis, a positive screening result from a standardized behavioral health screener or psychiatric hospitalizations.
