Dr. Drozda's work on the AMA Physician Consortium on Quality Care

Dr. Drozda is a member of the AMA's Physician Consortium on Quality Care. This began as the Perfomance Measures Advisory Committee (PMAC) of the American Medical Accreditation Program, which was the AMA's attempt at establishing a single national physician credentialing organization. Dr. Drozda was asked to be on the committee because of his experience in the area of physician performance measurement in the setting of managed care. The credentialing effort failed but enough good work had come out of the PMAC that the AMA chose to continue with that effort and to expand it. Representatives from virtually all of the medical specialty societies were added and the name was changed to the Consortium. In addition, the scope of work was expanded to include other issues related to quality of care.

The Consortium has concentrated on developing performance measures designed to be used as quality improvement tools for office practice. Dr. Drozda participated on the Work Group that developed performance measures in diabetes. Those were subsequently taken to the Performance Measures Coordinating Council of the AMA, NCQA, and JCAHO (now defunct) and adopted by it. He is currently on the Community Acquired Pneumonia Work Group as well. In addition, he has worked with groups dealing with methodologic questions and issues related to implementation of the measurement sets.

Dr. Drozda co-chaired (with Joe Messer) the Work Group that developed the measures on treatment of chronic stable coronary artery disease. They presented an abstract on these measures at last year's annual QI meeting of the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology. In addition, an abstract that includes some of their early pilot study data will be presented at an international QI meeting in Paris this October. These measures are being piloted in a number of settings and will be part of a major American College of Cardiology QI study being led by the University of Alabama. These QI studies are part of the College's Guideines Applied to Practice (GAP) project.

As a result of Dr. Drozda's with the AMA, he has been appointed as one of that organization's representatives to the Cardiovascular Advisory Committee that was put together as a joint venture of AMA, JCAHO, and NCQA. To this point they have worked on coordinating those organizations' measurement sets related to coronary artery disease.

Dr. Drozda also sits on the American College of Cardiology's Data Standards Committee for Atrial Fibrillation. The College has developed a national data base for cardiac cath labs and is in the process of expanding it to include the evaluation and treatment of a number of disorders including CHF and Acute Coronary Syndromes. The A. Fib Committee is developing data elements and definitions for the atrial fibrillation portion of the data base.