What Is the Person-Centered Primary Care Measure?

The Person-Centered Primary Care Measure (PCPCM) is a patient-reported outcome measure developed by the Larry A. Green Center in conjunction with The Center for Professionalism & Value in Health Care’s Measures That Matter initiative. In the March/April 2022 issue of FPM, we introduced this new measure and described its unique development pathway. In this supplement, we are sharing how the PCPCM is being used in practice and offering some tips and encouragement to help you get started.

The PCPCM is a survey-based measure that asks patients to assess their personal experience of care using the pillars of primary care—comprehensiveness, first contact access, coordination, and continuity—as guideposts. These pillars have long been associated with improvements in individual and population health, health equity, and cost outcomes. However, existing performance measures are largely focused on specific care or disease processes that are not representative of these important aspects of primary care. Even patient satisfaction measures, which are often tied to a particular care encounter, fall well short of assessing a patient’s views on the degree to which their primary care physician and care team meet their needs over time.

The questions asked on the 11-item patient-reported outcome survey instrument are designed to move primary care toward a paradigm focused on what matters to patients and physicians. The PCPCM is endorsed by the National Quality Forum (NQF #3568) and approved for use as a Quality Payment Program (QPP) patient-reported outcome performance measure (PRO-PM) in the Medicare Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) track of QPP (Q#483) (https://qpp.cms.gov/mips/explore-measures).

Access the full supplement.