The aim of the Idealized Design of Clinical Office Practices (IDCOP) initiative was to demonstrate that clinical office practices, with appropriate redesign, can achieve significant improvements in performance to meet today’s urgent social needs for higher-value health care. IDCOP was based on the belief that the clinical office lies at the heart of health care. For most patients most of the time, it is the primary locus of care, trust, coordination, and affection. For most physicians, it is the primary workplace. However, despite numerous local innovations in various elements of office care, many promising improvements remain unused, fragmented, isolated, and dispersed; their full potential has not yet been tapped. We believe that these innovations can be consolidated into new office designs capable of fundamentally improved performance levels – better clinical outcomes, lower costs, higher satisfaction, and improved efficiency.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI’s) IDCOP project built upon existing innovations, generated new innovations, in part by drawing upon other industries, and created, tested, and deployed a model of comprehensive redesign of office-based practice with fundamentally improved performance on multiple important dimensions: better clinical outcomes, lower costs, higher satisfaction, and improved efficiency in a more rewarding work setting – one that is focused on meeting patient needs and preferences.
By the end of 2003, the goal of the project was to have 20% of clinical office practices in the US implement the IDCOP model. IHI was able to use its communication and dissemination channels to share the results of this work, including the Annual International Summit on Redesigning the Clinical Office Practice (now the Annual International Summit on Improving Care in the Office Practice and the Community) to reach thousands of practices across the country and internationally.
