The Hudson Valley Initiative organization's activities continue to support the Characteristics of an Ideal Community:

• Care will be coordinated and managed by a primary care team along a continuum: The next phase of the Hudson Valley PCMH project will build on the success of practices that reached NCQA Level 3 Medical Home status in 2009.  In 2010, the practices were required to train staff and be certified in the Johns Hopkins University Guided Care program, conduct most of the elements of the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey, and participate in expanded quality monitoring functionalities.

• Care will be patient-centered and focused on the needs of the patient and family regardless of payment source: More practices are receiving practice transformation support and are expected to achieve NCQA Level 3 PCMH recognition this year.

• Consumers, providers, employers and health plans will have access to information about patient satisfaction, cost, quality and appropriateness of care delivered:  An aggressive research agenda in partnership with Weill Cornell Medical College has been nurtured to establish monitoring and evaluation with studies that include measures of patient satisfaction, physician satisfaction, the safety of interactive e-prescribing systems within electronic health records, quality and outcome measures and the impact of health information technology on quality and performance.

• Health information technology will be used by clinicians in all settings in a meaningful way to support, measure, evaluate and improve patient care:  MedAllies is working to introduce its enhanced health information exchange capability that will go live  to enable exchange of structured data between EHRs to support meaningful use.

• Health care financing will be restructured to sustain care delivery models that maximize value. In 2011 THINC will announce a significant pay-for-performance award to participating provider practices.