Impact of Providing Data on Family Medicine Practice Management Education

Residents need to learn about practice management, including how to improve the quality of their patient care utilizing practice data. However, little is known about the effectiveness of providing practice data to residents. This study examined the effectiveness of utilizing resident practice management reports.

We provided residents quarterly practice management reports with individual resident data on coding compliance (determined by manual chart review by a certified coder), clinical productivity (number of clinic sessions, visits per session, relative value units [RVUs] per visit, and RVUs per session), and patient quality outcomes (rates of diabetes mellitus control, diabetic nephropathy screening/management, hypertension control, influenza immunization, pneumococcal immunization, and colorectal cancer screening). We compared all data to national metrics. Quality outcome data was also provided by clinical team and with comparison to nonresidency departmental clinics. We surveyed residents before and after receiving these practice management reports to determine how they felt it prepared them for future practice (on a 9-point Likert scale).

There was significant improvement in the ability to implement clinic-based processes to improve patient care (6.5 vs 5.6; P=.04) and learning about clinical productivity/financial aspects of practicing family medicine (6.3 vs 5.4; P=.03). Other areas had trends of improvement, although not statistically significant.

Providing residents with their clinic practice data, with reference to team practice data and national benchmarks further helps them learn and apply practice management, when superimposed on an existing infrastructure to teach practice management.