Amy Mullins, MD, CPE, FAAFP, is the Medical Director for Quality Improvement for the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), which represents nearly 116,000 family physicians, family medicine residents, and medical students nationwide. Amy has 14 years of experience as a family physician, including administrative expertise focused on practice transformation through the patient-centered medical home model of care. AAFP is a founding member of NQF, and most recently, Amy served on the Measure Applications Partnership (MAP) Clinicians Workgroup. NQF spoke with Amy recently about quality measurement in family medicine.

NQF: How is measurement affecting family medicine? 

Amy: Measurement is making family physicians reexamine how we deliver care. In order to deliver the best care and outcomes, you need a team—there’s just too much to do.

NQF: What’s an example of how measurement impacted care in your practice? 

Amy: Before joining AAFP, I was a practicing physician and medical director at Trinity Clinic in Whitehouse, Texas. At our clinic we used an electronic health record (EHR) to proactively identify areas for improvement, including improving care and outcomes for our diabetic patients. When we first started implementing quality metrics, we assumed that the data pulled from our medical record was wrong. We thought we were seeing patients two, three, or four times per year. However, we found that many of these patients had not been seen that frequently, even though we were refilling their medications. We also learned that many of our diabetic patients were not up to date on their eye exams, and we could then reach out and help close those gaps in care. We would have never identified these discrepancies without measures.

NQF: What will aligning measures mean for family physicians? 

Amy: If we can really focus our efforts to ensure less duplication of measures, we can reduce a tremendous administrative burden on family physicians. Since these providers see patients from the cradle to the grave, just about every measure applies. The more that we can consolidate measures into core measure sets that can be harmonized across payers, the easier it will be to take care of patients. And as a result, we’ll see a big impact in the health of patients in our communities and across the nation.