Aledade, Bluegrass Community Health Center, Jefferson Health and NYC Health + Hospitals have been chosen to participate in the launch of an Advanced Primary Care pilot program created by the National Committee for Quality Assurance. 

Building on lessons from NCQA’s Patient-Centered Medical Home program, pilot participants will evaluate draft standards that emphasize proactive population health, behavioral health integration, strong care team coordination and data-enabled decision-making. They will test the standards in real-world settings, report electronic clinical quality measures and participate in a mock survey to inform future program design. 

The goal of the pilot is to create a clearer path to integrated, data-driven team-based care that enables primary care to thrive in advanced payment models and strengthens the relationship between payers and primary care.

“Primary care is the foundation of a high‑performing healthcare system, yet practices nationwide face mounting pressure from workforce shortages, uneven reimbursement, and increasingly complex patient needs,” said Vivek K. Garg, M.D., M.B.A., president and CEO of NCQA, in a statement. “This new pilot program is about answering a fundamental question: ‘What does great primary care need to succeed today?’ We’re grateful to have primary care partners who are already innovating in this space and who will help us create a high-impact set of standards and measures that focus on what matters most to patients, practices and payers.”

“As a large academic health system, Jefferson Health deeply values primary care as foundational to individual, family, community, and public health across the many communities we serve. Quality measures shape the daily efforts of our clinical teams, and they articulate the value of primary care’s complex work to stakeholders within and beyond healthcare,” said Anna Flattau, M.D., M.S., System Chief for Primary Care and Chair of Family and Community Medicine at Jefferson Health, in a statement. “We appreciate NCQA’s leadership in bringing on-the-ground voices from diverse organizations to help redefine the nation’s approach to primary care quality metrics.”

At the conclusion of the pilot, the four organizations will be rated on their overall results, and they will make recommendations about how NCQA should adjust and evolve the standards and measures in the future. NCQA will release findings from the pilot later this year and use participant feedback to refine a new advanced primary care framework designed to strengthen primary care’s role within the healthcare system and support practices to thrive within evolved payment arrangements.