Accountable Physician Practice
An Accountable Physician Practice is a multispecialty medical group or physician organization that strives to integrate and coordinate the work of a community of physicians and health care professionals to provide comprehensive outpatient services for patients. These health care professionals work in teams and are encouraged and supported by the organization’s work flow processes, communications procedures, and payment systems to quickly and easily get patients the care they need when they need it. The Accountable Physician Practice is built on the multispecialty medical group model: teams of physicians skilled in a range of specialties who practice together. These groups include primary care doctors, specialists, health educators, nurses, dieticians, and all the other health professionals a patient might need to stay healthy.

Coordinated care
Coordinated care is enhanced quality of care and quality of life for patients requiring health care services from multiple providers and across multiple health care facilities or settings. Patients receive coordinated care from an efficient integrated or organized delivery system, wherein medical resources are shared by and communication about treatment plans takes place between all care providers so that the best, most-informed medical decisions can be made on behalf of the patient.

Organized delivery system:
An organized delivery system is a “network of organizations that provides or arranges to provide a coordinated continuum of services to a defined population and is willing to be held clinically and fiscally accountable for the outcomes and health status of the population served.”
—S. M. Shortell and others, Remaking Health Care in America: The Evolution of Organized Delivery Systems (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996), p. 7.

Integrating Services for Low-Income Seniors Shows Health Care Benefit, by Claire Sowerbutt, Contributing Writer, MedPage Today, December 11, 2007.

INDIANAPOLIS, Dec. 11 -- For low-income seniors, the likelihood of providing the recommended standard of health care services could be enhanced by integrating home-based and institutional services, found researchers here.

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“From High Tech to Soft Touch: The Everett Clinic uses innovative ways to control health care costs,” by Bryan Corliss, Washington CEO, November 26, 2007.

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“CAPP’s 35 MSMGs [multispecialty medical groups] share a common vision as learning organizations dedicated to the improvement of clinical care. Their features include physician leadership and governance; commitment to evidence-based care management processes; well-developed quality improvement systems; team-based care; the use of advance clinical information technology; and the collection, analysis, and distribution of clinical performance information. These features are congruent with the [Institute of Medicine’s] recommendations on key elements needed to redesign delivery systems.”

From Chapter 5, “Developing the Test Bed—Linking Integrated Service Delivery Systems: Council of Accountable Physician Practices,” by Michael A. Mustile, MD. The Learning Healthcare System: Workshop Summary (IOM Roundtable on Evidence-Based Medicine), edited by LeighAnne Olsen, Dara Aisner, and J. Michael McGinnis, National Academies Press, 2007.

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“A shift from the current care model to a more coordinated care model centered on primary care is one potential way to help stave off the healthcare dilemma.”

“It's too expensive to be a primary-care doctor,” by Debra A. Geihsler, president and CEO of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates & Atrius Health. Boston Globe, July 25, 2007.

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