*NCQA PPC Version 2 is now available*
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The Bridges to Excellence (BTE) initiative is comprised of three individual programs, each of which is designed to promote and reward physicians for improving the quality of patient care:

Physician Office Link (POL): rewards office practices for the use of systematic information to enhance the quality of patient care.

Diabetes Care Link (DCL): rewards physicians for demonstrating good outcomes in diabetes care.

Cardiac Care Link (CCL): rewards physicians for demonstrating good outcomes in cardiac care

Physicians who demonstrate high levels of performance in these program areas are eligible for incentive bonuses paid by participating purchasers. Each of the three programs has its own rewards and performance criteria.

To obtain the rewards offered under the Bridges to Excellence programs, physicians must demonstrate high levels of performance in the three BTE program areas by passing specific performance measurement criteria that are administered by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).

Physicians who pass NCQA's performance criteria and obtain the rewards offered through the BTE rewards programs also will be listed on the Bridges to Excellence web site, to publicly recognize their achievement.

More detailed information regarding the specific physician rewards available under the POL, DCL, and CCL programs, as well as information regarding NCQA's performance assessment programs, can be found under the links to the left.

NCQA Physician Practice Connections Version 2 Standards

On January 31, 2006, NCQA released Physician Practice Connections Version 2 (PPC v2) to the public.

PPC v2 will not impact the current BTE pilot markets of Boston, MA and Capital Region NY; the current physician recognition and application process will stay the same until the end of the BTE pilot on 7/24/06.

Bridges to Excellence is supporting the use of the new PPC v2 standards in all future markets and will work to transition from v1 to v2 in current markets upon completion of the pilot phase.

There are 9 modules in PPC v2:

PPC 1 - Access and Communication
PPC 2 - Patient Tracking and Registry Functions
PPC 3 - Care Management
PPC 4 - Self Management Support
PPC 5 - Electronic Prescribing
PPC 6 - Test Tracking
PPC 7 - Referral Tracking
PPC 8 - Performance Reporting and Improvement
PPC 9 - Interoperability

Each of these modules has 3 possible levels of element completion:

• Basic elements assess the use of evidence-based standards of care, maintenance of patient registries for the purpose of identifying and following up with at-risk patients and provision of educational resources to patients.
• Intermediate elements ask whether practices use electronic systems to maintain patient records, provide decision support, enter orders for prescriptions and lab tests and provide patient reminders.
  
• Advanced elements ask whether a practice’s electronic systems interconnect and whether they are “interoperable” with other systems, whether it uses nationally accepted medical code sets and whether it can automatically send, receive and integrate data such as lab results and medical histories from other organizations’ systems.
  Individual markets will determine the reward schedule that corresponds to the number of passed modules and the level at which the elements in each module are passed.

Individual markets will determine the reward schedule that corresponds to the number of passed modules and the level at which the elements in each module are passed.

For POL rewards, BTE recommends the following reward schedule:

Basic recognition in PPC constitutes eligibility for $15 in rewards per patient per year.

For Intermediate recognition it is $30 and for Advanced it is $50.

For a comparision of PPCv1 requirements to PPCv2 requirements, download this chart (57kb MS Word Document).

For more information about PPC v2, please visit NCQA's website at www.ncqa.org/ppc/.