A Health Educator in a Family Medicine Residency: The Story (M. Lee Chambliss MD, MSPH)

We describe how our residency was able to create a self-funded position for a master's level health educator and give details about her activities over the last 3 years. In the first year she organized our nearly nonexistent Medicare Annual Wellness visits and at the end of the year was able to personally perform sufficient visits to pay for her position. During the second year her role expanded, and she led our re-certification as a level 3 PCMH which required dramatically less physician box clicking than our first certification and improved our A1C numbers. Most recently she has become our practice quality coordinator. In that role she consults on and helps organize all quality initiatives including resident research projects, private insurance quality reimbursement incentives, Meaningful Use, and our ACO quality metrics. A health educator can fill many roles in residency: s(he) may generate revenue directly via wellness visits, coach individual patients to meet quality outcomes, and lead or consult on quality improvement projects and incentives that also produce practice income. This flexibility is invaluable as residencies face increasing demands for financial accountability and quality improvement. Upon completion of this session, participants should be able to: 1. Create a health educator position and find suitable candidates. 2. Employ a health educator to generate practice revenue by performing Medicare AWVs. 3. Use a health educator in a variety of roles: as a health...
Source: Family Medicine Digital Resources Library (FMDRL) Recently Uploaded - Category: Primary Care Source Type: news