Prepared for:
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
540 Gaither Road
Rockville, MD 20850
www.ahrq.gov
Contract No. HHSA2902009000191 Task Order No.6
Prepared by:
Mathematica Policy Research
Princeton, NJ
Project Director: Deborah Peikes
Deputy Project Director: Dana Petersen
Principal Investigators: Deborah Peikes, Erin Fries Taylor, and Jesse Crosson
AHRQ Publication No. 15-0060-EF
September 2015
Links updated January 2022.
Suggested Citation: Primary Care Practice Facilitation Curriculum. AHRQ Publication No. 15-0060-EF, Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; September 2015 (links updated January 2022).
Preface
"The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality recognizes that revitalizing the Nation's primary care system is foundational to achieving high-quality, accessible, efficient health care for all Americans. The primary care medical home, also referred to as the patient centered medical home (PCMH), advanced primary care, and the healthcare home, is a promising model for transforming the organization and delivery of primary care." These words, found in the welcome message on AHRQ's PCMH Resource Center Web site, have served as the guiding principle for the development of this curriculum and other resources to help support the transformation of primary care practice from older models of care delivery to 21st Century models that provide better care, smarter spending, and healthier people.
Practice facilitation is one evidence-based approach to assisting practices with making the substantive, meaningful, and ongoing changes need to adopt these new models. Practice facilitation can also support other proven quality improvement techniques including data feedback and benchmarking, expert consultation and shared learning or learning collaboratives. The trusted relationships of practice facilitators with practice leaders, clinicians, and staff empowers practices to improve delivery of evidence-based care, increase patient engagement, and decrease the burnout rate of primary care health professionals.
This expanded Primary Care Practice Facilitation Curriculum is AHRQ's latest and most extensive effort to support the education and training of practice facilitators. David Meyers, M.D., AHRQ's Chief Medical Officer and former Director of the Center for Primary Care, Prevention and Clinical Partnerships envisioned the curriculum as the way to endow practice facilitators with the skills necessary to advance quality improvement in primary care. The Curriculum builds on two previous AHRQ products, Integrating Chronic Care and Business Strategies in the Safety Net: A Practice Coaching Manual and the Practice Facilitation Handbook: Training Modules for New Facilitators and Their Trainers.
We are grateful to AHRQ's Cindy Brach, who was pivotal to both of these seminal products, for her continuing guidance on the Curriculum as well. The Curriculum is also designed to complement AHRQ's Developing and Running a Primary Care Practice Facilitation Program: A How-To Guide—an effort led by much of the same team that led the development of this curriculum. In addition, the Curriculum dovetails nicely with other AHRQ initiatives focused on quality improvement at the practice level, such as AHRQ's TeamSTEPPS, HIT tools and resources, and Practice-based Research Networks.
Development of this curriculum was a Herculean, 2-year effort with many contributors, but special thanks go to the members of the Technical Expert Panel who gave so very generously of their time to conference calls and numerous requests for reviews of the content. (For panelist names, see the box at the end of this preface.) Deepest gratitude goes to Jay Crosson, Ph.D., from Mathematica Policy Research (MPR) and Lyndee Knox, Ph.D., from LA Net Community Health Resource Network. Without their leadership and writing expertise this project never would have come to fruition. Thanks also to the many contributing authors and the teams at Mathematica and LA Net who supported the work, especially Alex Bohn at MPR who effectively and cheerfully coordinated dozens of moving parts. Finally, thanks to the team at AHRQ who helped make this vision become a reality, especially the editorial team of Margi Grady, Kathy McKay, and Doreen Bonnett.
Our hope is that this curriculum will be taken up in whole or parts and used to prepare the next generations of practice facilitators to assist the physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, medical assistants and office staff with their efforts to transform the way primary care is delivered. We also believe that portions of this curriculum can be helpful in health professions education programs to build competencies in practice-based learning and improvement, systems-based practice and other competency domains where knowledge and skills of quality improvement methods are needed. Only through working together can we be successful at truly revitalizing primary care, and thereby improving the health of the Nation.
