OREANDA-NEWS. July 11, 2016. For the 10th consecutive year, The Permanente Medical Group and the Southern California Permanente Medical Group have earned Elite status – the highest rating possible – in CAPG’s 2016 Standards of Excellence survey. Together, the two medical groups provide care for the approximately 8.2 million Kaiser Permanente members in California.

CAPG is the nation’s leading trade association for accountable physician organizations, and survey ratings are given to physician groups based on their performance in improving patient experience, clinical care and affordability of care. CAPG partners with the National Center for Quality Assurance, a leader in accreditation for accountable care organizations, on the analysis, scoring and reporting of the survey.

“Achieving an Elite status rating for the past 10 years is a tribute to the ongoing excellence and leadership of our physicians and staff,” said Robert Pearl, MD, executive director and CEO of The Permanente Medical Group. “Our nearly 9,000 physicians throughout Northern California provide patients with exceptional quality, personalized service and the most advanced technology available in health care today. We are proud to be a model for the nation and appreciate being recognized by CAPG for the superior levels of quality, access and service we provide.”

“It’s the essentials of Permanente Medicine and our culture at SCPMG that enable us to consistently win quality accolades like this one,” says Edward M. Ellison, MD, executive medical director and chairman of the board of the Southern California Permanente Medical Group. “We are a medical group that is physician-led, evidence-based, technology-enabled, culturally responsive and community oriented. Our patient-centered, comprehensive systems of care are delivered with kindness and compassion by highly skilled teams of physicians and staff who are passionate about our members’ health.”

To achieve Elite status, TPMG and SCPMG achieved five-star ratings in five publicly reported domains: care management practices, information technology, accountability and transparency, patient-centered care and group support of advanced primary care. The threshold for achieving a star in each domain is set annually by a CAPG peer committee that analyzes survey performance.

According to Donald Crane, CAPG president and CEO, the Standards of Excellence survey is recognized “as the industry standard by which the nation’s health care systems can assess the delivery of accountable and value-based care and improve patient care coordination, in line with ongoing health care reform.”

This year, 114 provider organizations participated in the annual assessment, and 71 physician organizations achieved the Elite honor in 2016, representing an increase of six groups compared to 2015, despite the higher bar for demonstrating improved performance.

The survey was offered to more than 250 CAPG medical group members in 40 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The 114 organizations that participated in the critical self-assessment cover 11.6 million people in the commercial line of business, including Medicare Advantage, along with an additional estimated 3.1 million individuals in government programs.