Physician Consortium

PCPI- Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement

In American Medical Association PCPI is oriented to improve the quality, and value of care to the patients by various programs including maintenance of clinical performance measures which are evidence based, measurement science, improvement of the quality of care with the help of National Quality Registry Network (NQRN).(1)

NQF – National quality forum

A membership based organization that works for improvements in quality of healthcare. It implements a national strategic plan for healthcare quality measurement and reporting. This forum make sure that quality performance information is accurate and accessible for everyone in public with feedback (2).

HAC – hospital-acquired condition

P4P- Pay for performance

Also known as value based purchasing, pay for performance allots financial incentives to health care providers or hospitals who met certain standards like measures to improve quality of life or counselling for healthy life style. In contrary this model can penalize for poor health care outcomes (11).

ALOS- Average length of stay

As name suggest it is the average number of days a patient admitted in hospital in treatment process. Calculated by dividing total number of inpatient days for all patients with total admissions in a fiscal year(12).

ADC- Average daily census

Defined as the average number of inpatients receiving health care per day. Calculated by total patient days in a particular period of time are divided by the number of days in that period

LTAC- Long term acute care

As name suggests LTAC provides specialized acute care for long term period of 20 to 30 days. Rather than traditional skilled care LTAC provides individualized and resource-intensive care(13).

SNF- Skilled nursing

HBP- Hospital-Based Physician

As per CMS a doctor is said to be Hospital-Based Physician if they spend 90 % of their working hours in either inpatient hospital or outpatient hospital or emergency care setting. Quite often there are specialized in anesthesiology, intensive care, cardiac care , pathology or radiology(24).

EMR - Electronic Medical Record

In contrary to traditional way of recording patient information on paper , EMR is the way of recording all patient information in electronic form which make physician work easy and helps to retrieve fast without any loss.

HIXs- Health Insurance Exchange

As per Obama care act HIXs provide scope to inter changeable exchange of qualified health plans which is strictly under federal and state laws.

HIE - Health Information Exchange

Exchange of patient health information in electronic form between various hospitals or within different departments of same hospitals to avoid unnecessary tests and improve the quality of health care (25).

HEDIS- Healthcare Effectiveness Data and