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The medical home, [1] also known as the patient-centered medical home (PCMH), is a team-based health care delivery model led by a health care provider [2] to provide comprehensive and continuous medical care to patients with a goal to obtain maximal health outcomes. [3] [4] It is described in the "Joint Principles" (see below) as "an approach to providing comprehensive primary care for children, youth and adults." [5]
The provision of medical homes is intended to allow better access to health care, increase satisfaction with care, and improve health. [6] [7] [8] [9]
The "Joint Principles" that popularly define a PCMH were established through the efforts of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), American College of Physicians (ACP), and American Osteopathic Association (AOA) in 2007. [10] Care coordination is an essential component of the PCMH. Care coordination requires additional resources such as health information technology and appropriately-trained staff to provide coordinated care through team-based models. Additionally, payment models that compensate PCMHs for their functions devoted to care coordination activities and patient-centered care management that fall outside the face-to-face patient encounter may help encourage further coordination. [10] [11] [ page needed ]
The concept of the "medical home" has evolved since the first introduction of the term by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1967. At the time, it was envisioned as a central source for all the medical information about a child, especially those with special needs. [12] [13] Efforts by Calvin C.J. Sia, MD, a Honolulu-based pediatrician, in pursuit of new approaches to improve early childhood development in Hawaii in the 1980s [14] laid the groundwork for an academy policy statement in 1992 that defined a medical home largely the way Sia conceived it: a strategy for delivering the family-centered, comprehensive, continuous, and coordinated care that all infants and children deserve. [15] In 2002, the organization expanded and operationalized the definition. [14] [16] [17]
In 2002, seven U.S. national family medicine organizations created the Future of Family Medicine project to "transform and renew the specialty of family medicine." [18] Among the recommendations of the project was that every American should have a "personal medical home" through which they could receive acute, chronic, and preventive health services. [18] These services should be "accessible, accountable, comprehensive, integrated, patient-centered, safe, scientifically valid, and satisfying to both patients and their physicians." [18]
As of 2004, one study estimated that if the Future of Family Medicine recommendations were followed (including implementation of personal medical homes), "health care costs would likely decrease by 5.6 percent, resulting in national savings of 67 billion dollars per year, with an improvement in the quality of the health care provided." [19] A review of this assertion, published later the same year, determined that medical homes are "associated with better health,... with lower overall costs of care and with reductions in disparities in health." [20]
By 2005, the American College of Physicians had developed an "advanced medical home" model. [9] [21] This model involved the use of evidence-based medicine, clinical decision support tools, the Chronic Care Model, medical care plans, "enhanced and convenient" access to care, quantitative indicators of quality, health information technology, and feedback on performance. [21] Payment reform was also recognized as important to the implementation of the model. [22]
IBM and other organizations started the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative in 2006 to promote the medical home model. [23] [24] As of 2009, its membership included "some 500 large employers, insurers, consumer groups, and doctors". [24]
In 2007, the American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Physicians, and American Osteopathic Association—the largest primary care physician organizations in the United States—released the Joint Principles of the Patient-Centered Medical Home. [5] Defining principles included:
A survey of 3,535 U.S. adults released in 2007 found that 27 percent of the respondents reported having "four indicators of a medical home." [27] Furthermore, having a medical home was associated with better access to care, more preventive screenings, higher quality of care, and fewer racial and ethnic disparities. [27]
Important developments concerning medical homes between 2008 and 2010 included:
The Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC) in 2009 introduced the first accreditation program for medical homes to include an onsite survey. Unlike other quality assessment programs for medical homes, AAAHC Accreditation also mandates that PCMHs meet the Core Standards required of all ambulatory organizations seeking AAAHC Accreditation.
AAAHC standards assess PCMH providers from the perspective of the patient. The onsite survey is conducted by surveyors who are qualified professionals – physicians, registered nurses, administrators and others – who have first-hand experience with ambulatory health care organizations. The onsite survey process gives them an opportunity to directly observe the quality of patient care and the facilities in which it is delivered, review medical records and assess patient perceptions and satisfaction.
The AAAHC Accreditation Handbook for Ambulatory Health Care includes a chapter specifically devoted to medical home standards, including assessment of the following characteristics:
In addition, electronic data management must be continually assessed as a tool for facilitating the Accreditation Association medical home.
AAAHC Medical Home Accreditation also requires that core standards required of all ambulatory organizations seeking AAAHC Accreditation be met, including: Standards for rights of patients; governance; administration; quality of care; quality management and improvement; clinical records and health information; infection prevention and control, and safety; and facilities and environment. Depending on the services provided, AAAHC-Accredited medical homes may also have to meet adjunct standards such as for anesthesia, surgical, pharmaceutical, pathology and medical laboratory, diagnostic and other imaging, and dental services, among others. [39]
In addition to its accreditation program for medical homes, the AAAHC is conducting a pilot "Medical Home Certification" program, which includes an onsite survey to evaluate an organization against their standards for medical homes. Full accreditation requires that organizations also be evaluated against all AAAHC core standards. [40]
The National Committee for Quality Assurance's (NCQA) "Physician Practice Connections and Patient Centered Medical Home" (PPC-PCMH) Recognition Program emphasizes the systematic use of patient-centered, coordinated care management processes. It is an extension of the Physician Practice Connections Recognition Program, which was initiated in 2003 with support from organizations such as The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Commonwealth Fund and Bridges to Excellence. [41] The PPC-PCMH enhances the quality of patient care through the well known and empirically validated Wagner Chronic Care Model, which encourages the health care system to use community resources to effectively care for patients with chronic illnesses through productive interactions between activated patients and a prepared practice team. Furthermore, it recognizes practices that successfully use systematic processes and technology leading to improved quality of patient care. [42]
With the guidance from the ACP, the AAFP, the AAP and the AOA the NCQA launched PPC-PCMH and based the program on the medical home joint principles developed by these organizations. [43]
If practices achieve NCQA's PCMH Recognition they can take advantage of financial incentives that health plans, employers, federal and state-sponsored pilot programs offer and they may qualify for additional bonuses or payments.
In order to attain PPC-PCMH Recognition, specific elements must be met. Included in the standards are ten "must-pass" elements:
Recent peer-reviewed literature that examines the prevalence and effectiveness of medical homes includes:
In a study of 10 countries, the authors wrote that in most of the countries "health promotion is usually separate from acute care, so the notion[] of a... medical home as conceptualized in the United States... does not exist." [46] Nevertheless, the seven-country study of Schoen et al. found that the prevalence of medical homes was highest in New Zealand (61%) and lowest in Germany (45%). [7]
Some suggest that the medical home mimics the managed care "gatekeeper" models historically employed by HMOs; however, there are important distinctions between care coordination in the medical home and the "gatekeeper" model. [24] [47] In the medical home, the patient has open access to see whatever physician they choose. No referral or permission is required. The personal physician of choice, who has comprehensive knowledge of the patient's medical conditions, facilitates and provides information to subspecialists involved in the care of the patient. The gatekeeper model placed more financial risk on the physicians resulting in rewards for less care.[ citation needed ] The medical home puts emphasis on medical management rewarding quality patient-centered care.
The medical home model has its critics, including the following major organizations:
Clinics compliant with principles of the patient-centered medical home may be associated with more operating costs. [52]
One notable implementation of medical homes has been Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC), which was started under the name "Carolina Access" in the early 1990s. [53] CCNC consists of 14 community health networks that link approximately 750,000 Medicaid patients to medical homes. [54] It is funded by North Carolina's Medicaid office, which pays $3 per member per month to networks and $2.50 per member per month to physicians. [54] CCNC is reported to have improved healthcare for patients with asthma and diabetes. [54] Non-peer-reviewed analyses cited in a peer-reviewed article suggested that CCNC saved North Carolina $60 million in fiscal year 2003 and $161 million in fiscal year 2006. [54] [55] [56] However, an independent analysis asserted that CCNC cost the state over $400 million in 2006 instead of producing savings. [57] More recent analyses show that the program improved the quality of care for asthma and diabetes patients significantly, reducing emergency department and hospital use that produced savings of $150 million in 2007 alone. [58]
The Rhode Island Chronic Care Sustainability Initiative (CSI-RI) is a community-wide collaborative effort convened in 2006 by the Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner to develop a sustainable model of primary care that will improve the care of chronic disease and lead to better overall health outcomes for Rhode Islanders. [59] CSI-RI is focused on improving the delivery of chronic illness care and supporting and sustaining primary care in the state of Rhode Island through the development and implementation of the patient-centered medical home. The CSI-RI Medical Home demonstration officially launched in October 2008 with 5 primary care practices and was expanded in April 2010 to include an additional 8 sites. [60] [61] Thirteen primary care sites, 66 providers, 39 Family Medicine residents, 68,000 patients (46,000 covered lives), and all Rhode Island payers are participating in the demonstration. Further, its selection to participate in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Multi-Payer Advanced Primary Care Practice demonstration, CSI-RI is one few medical home demonstrations in the nation with virtually 100% payer participation. Since the start of the demonstration, CSI-RI sites have implemented a series of delivery system reforms in their practices, aimed at becoming patient-centered medical homes, and in turn receive a supplemental per-member-per-month payment from all of Rhode Island's insurers. Each participating practice site also receives funding from participating payers for an on-site nurse care manager, who can work with all patients in the practice, regardless of insurance type or status. All 5 original pilot sites achieved NCQA level 1 PPC-PCMH recognition in 2009, and all 8 expansion sites achieved at least level 1 PPC-PCMH recognition in 2010. As of December 2010, all of the pilot sites and two of the expansion sites have been recognized by NCQA as level 3 patient-centered medical homes.
CareFirst has one of the largest projects, and in 2018 announced estimated savings of $1 billion over the prior eight years. [62]
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality offers grants to primary care practices in order for them to become patient-centered medical homes. The grants are designed to increase the evidence base for these types of transformations. [63]
As of December 31, 2009, there were at least 26 pilot projects involving medical homes with external payment reform being conducted in 18 states. [64] These pilots included over 14,000 physicians caring for nearly 5 million patients. [64] The projects are evaluating factors such as clinical quality, cost, patient experience/satisfaction, and provider experience/satisfaction. [65] Some of the projects underway are:
In 2006, TransforMED announced the launch of the National Demonstration Project aimed at transforming the way primary care is delivered in our country. The practice redesign initiative, funded by the AAFP, ran from June 2006 to May 2008. It was the first and largest "proof-of-concept" project to determine empirically whether the TransforMED Patient-Centered Medical Home model of care could be implemented successfully and sustained in today's health care environment. More specifically, the project served as a learning lab to gain better insight into the kinds of hands-on technical support family physicians want and need to implement the PCMH model of care. Learn more about National Demonstration Project
Between 2002 and 2006, Group Health Cooperative made reforms to increase efficiency and access at 20 primary care clinics in western Washington. These reforms had an adverse impact, increasing physician workload, fatigue, and turnover. Negative trends in quality of care and utilization also appeared. As a result, the Group Health Research Institute developed a patient-centered medical home model in one of the clinics. By increasing staff, patient outreach and care management, the clinic reduced emergency department visits and improved patient perceptions of care quality. [71]
There are four core functions of primary care as conceptualized by Barbara Starfield and the Institute of Medicine. These four core functions consist of providing "accessible, comprehensive, longitudinal, and coordinated care in the context of families and community". [11] [ page needed ]
In the PCMH model, the integration of diverse services that a patient may need is encouraged. This integration which also involves the patient in interpreting the streams of information and working together to find a plan that fits with the patient's values and preferences is under-recognized and under-appreciated. [72]
Appropriate coordinated care depends on the patient or the population of patients and to a large extent, the complexity of their needs. The challenges involved with facilitating the delivery of care increases as the complexity of their needs increase. These complexities include chronic or acute health conditions, the social vulnerability of the patient, and the environment of the patient including the number of providers involved in their care. Other factors that may play a role in the patient's coordination of care include their preferences and their ability to organize their own care. The increases in complexity may overwhelm informal coordinating functions requiring a care team that can explicitly provide coordinated care and assume responsibility for the coordination of a particular patient's care. [11] [ page needed ]
According to the ACO, care coordination achieves two critical objectives—high-quality and high-value care. ACOs can build on the coordinated care provided by the PCMHs and ensure and incentivize communications between teams of providers that operate in various settings. ACOs can facilitate transitions and align the resources needed to meet the clinical and coordinated care needs of the population. They can develop and support systems for the coordination of care of patients in non-ambulatory care settings. Furthermore, they can monitor health information systems and the timeliness and completeness of information transactions between primary care physicians and specialists. The tracking of this information can be used to incentivize higher levels of responsiveness and collaborations. [11] [ page needed ]
Emergency medicine is the medical speciality concerned with the care of illnesses or injuries requiring immediate medical attention. Emergency physicians specialize in providing care for unscheduled and undifferentiated patients of all ages. As first-line providers, in coordination with emergency medical services, they are primarily responsible for initiating resuscitation and stabilization and performing the initial investigations and interventions necessary to diagnose and treat illnesses or injuries in the acute phase. Emergency medical physicians generally practice in hospital emergency departments, pre-hospital settings via emergency medical services, and intensive care units. Still, they may also work in primary care settings such as urgent care clinics.
Health care, or healthcare, is the improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health professionals and allied health fields. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, midwifery, nursing, optometry, audiology, psychology, occupational therapy, physical therapy, athletic training, and other health professions all constitute health care. The term includes work done in providing primary care, secondary care, and tertiary care, as well as in public health.
Palliative care is an interdisciplinary medical caregiving approach aimed at optimizing quality of life and mitigating suffering among people with serious, complex, and often terminal illnesses. Within the published literature, many definitions of palliative care exist. The World Health Organization (WHO) describes palliative care as "an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain, illnesses including other problems whether physical, psychosocial, and spiritual". In the past, palliative care was a disease specific approach, but today the WHO takes a broader patient-centered approach that suggests that the principles of palliative care should be applied as early as possible to any chronic and ultimately fatal illness. This shift was important because if a disease-oriented approach is followed, the needs and preferences of the patient are not fully met and aspects of care, such as pain, quality of life, and social support, as well as spiritual and emotional needs, fail to be addressed. Rather, a patient-centered model prioritizes relief of suffering and tailors care to increase the quality of life for terminally ill patients.
Primary care is the day-to-day healthcare given by a health care provider. Typically this provider acts as the first contact and principal point of continuing care for patients within a healthcare system, and coordinates other specialist care that the patient may need. Patients commonly receive primary care from professionals such as a primary care physician, a physician assistant, a physical therapist, or a nurse practitioner. In some localities, such a professional may be a registered nurse, a pharmacist, a clinical officer, or an Ayurvedic or other traditional medicine professional. Depending on the nature of the health condition, patients may then be referred for secondary or tertiary care.
Family medicine is a medical specialty within primary care that provides continuing and comprehensive health care for the individual and family across all ages, genders, diseases, and parts of the body. The specialist, who is usually a primary care physician, is named a family physician. It is often referred to as general practice and a practitioner as a general practitioner. Historically, their role was once performed by any doctor with qualifications from a medical school and who works in the community. However, since the 1950s, family medicine / general practice has become a specialty in its own right, with specific training requirements tailored to each country. The names of the specialty emphasize its holistic nature and/or its roots in the family. It is based on knowledge of the patient in the context of the family and the community, focusing on disease prevention and health promotion. According to the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA), the aim of family medicine is "promoting personal, comprehensive and continuing care for the individual in the context of the family and the community". The issues of values underlying this practice are usually known as primary care ethics.
In the healthcare industry, pay for performance (P4P), also known as "value-based purchasing", is a payment model that offers financial incentives to physicians, hospitals, medical groups, and other healthcare providers for meeting certain performance measures. Clinical outcomes, such as longer survival, are difficult to measure, so pay for performance systems usually evaluate process quality and efficiency, such as measuring blood pressure, lowering blood pressure, or counseling patients to stop smoking. This model also penalizes health care providers for poor outcomes, medical errors, or increased costs. Integrated delivery systems where insurers and providers share in the cost are intended to help align incentives for value-based care.
The American College of Radiology (ACR), founded in 1923, is a professional medical society representing nearly 40,000 diagnostic radiologists, radiation oncologists, interventional radiologists, nuclear medicine physicians and medical physicists.
Fee-for-service (FFS) is a payment model where services are unbundled and paid for separately.
Patient safety is a discipline that emphasizes safety in health care through the prevention, reduction, reporting and analysis of error and other types of unnecessary harm that often lead to adverse patient events. The frequency and magnitude of avoidable adverse events, often known as patient safety incidents, experienced by patients was not well known until the 1990s, when multiple countries reported significant numbers of patients harmed and killed by medical errors. Recognizing that healthcare errors impact 1 in every 10 patients around the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) calls patient safety an endemic concern. Indeed, patient safety has emerged as a distinct healthcare discipline supported by an immature yet developing scientific framework. There is a significant transdisciplinary body of theoretical and research literature that informs the science of patient safety with mobile health apps being a growing area of research.
Hospital accreditation has been defined as “A self-assessment and external peer assessment process used by health care organizations to accurately assess their level of performance in relation to established standards and to implement ways to continuously improve”. Critically, accreditation is not just about standard-setting: there are analytical, counseling and self-improvement dimensions to the process. There are parallel issues in evidence-based medicine, quality assurance and medical ethics, and the reduction of medical error is a key role of the accreditation process. Hospital accreditation is therefore one component in the maintenance of patient safety. However, there is limited and contested evidence supporting the effectiveness of accreditation programs.
The Erlanger Health System, incorporated as the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Hospital Authority, a non-profit, public benefit corporation registered in the State of Tennessee, is a system of hospitals, physicians, and medical services based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Erlanger's main location, Erlanger Baroness Hospital, is a tertiary referral hospital and Level I Trauma Center serving a 50,000 sq mi (130,000 km2) region of East Tennessee, North Georgia, North Alabama, and western North Carolina. The system provides critical care services to patients within a 150 mi (240 km) radius through six Life Force air ambulance helicopters, which are equipped to perform in-flight surgical procedures and transfusions.
The Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC) is a coalition of approximately 1,000 organizations and individuals, employers, consumer and patient/family advocacy groups, patient quality organizations, health plans, labor unions, hospitals, physicians, and other health professionals. They work on establishing the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) model, an approach to providing comprehensive care for children, youth, and adults. They are headquartered in downtown Washington, D.C.
Guided Care is a model of proactive, comprehensive health care for people with several chronic conditions. A form of medical home, the model has been developed and tested by a multidisciplinary team of experts at the Roger C. Lipitz Center for Integrated Health Care in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Guided Care is provided by physician-nurse teams in primary care practices to the physicians' most complex patients, mainly older adults with chronic conditions and complicated health needs. It is designed to increase patients' quality of care and quality of life, while improving the efficiency of their use of health care resources, thus reducing their overall health care costs.
Bundled payment is the reimbursement of health care providers "on the basis of expected costs for clinically-defined episodes of care." It has been described as "a middle ground" between fee-for-service reimbursement and capitation, given that risk is shared between payer and provider. Bundled payments have been proposed in the health care reform debate in the United States as a strategy for reducing health care costs, especially during the Obama administration (2009–2016). Commercial payers have shown interest in bundled payments in order to reduce costs. In 2012, it was estimated that approximately one-third of the United States healthcare reimbursement used bundled methodology.
Clinical peer review, also known as medical peer review is the process by which health care professionals, including those in nursing and pharmacy, evaluate each other's clinical performance. A discipline-specific process may be referenced accordingly.
An accountable care organization (ACO) is a healthcare organization that ties provider reimbursements to quality metrics and reductions in the cost of care. ACOs in the United States are formed from a group of coordinated health-care practitioners. They use alternative payment models, normally, capitation. The organization is accountable to patients and third-party payers for the quality, appropriateness and efficiency of the health care provided. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an ACO is "an organization of health care practitioners that agrees to be accountable for the quality, cost, and overall care of Medicare beneficiaries who are enrolled in the traditional fee-for-service program who are assigned to it".
Health care quality is a level of value provided by any health care resource, as determined by some measurement. As with quality in other fields, it is an assessment of whether something is good enough and whether it is suitable for its purpose. The goal of health care is to provide medical resources of high quality to all who need them; that is, to ensure good quality of life, cure illnesses when possible, to extend life expectancy, and so on. Researchers use a variety of quality measures to attempt to determine health care quality, including counts of a therapy's reduction or lessening of diseases identified by medical diagnosis, a decrease in the number of risk factors which people have following preventive care, or a survey of health indicators in a population who are accessing certain kinds of care.
The Oncology Care Model (OCM) is an episode-based payment system developed by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. The multipayer model is designed for discrete instances of care, especially those involving chemotherapy, which triggers the six-month episode. The program combines fee-for-service (FFS) payments for established services, monthly payments for additional care under a structured guideline, and performance-based payments weighed against quality metrics and benchmarks.
Federal and state governments, insurance companies and other large medical institutions are heavily promoting the adoption of electronic health records. The US Congress included a formula of both incentives and penalties for EMR/EHR adoption versus continued use of paper records as part of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, enacted as part of the, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Jacqueline Nwando Olayiwola is an American family physician, public health professional, author, professor, and women's empowerment leader. She is the Senior Vice President and Chief Health Equity Officer of Humana and a chair and Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Prior to her appointment at OSU, she served as the inaugural Chief Clinical Transformation Officer for RubiconMD, an eConsult platform that improves primary care access to specialty care for underserved patients. Olayiwola is dedicated to serving marginalized patient populations and addressing the social determinants through community and technology-based infrastructures of healthcare reform. She has published articles on the use of eConsults and telehealth to provide underserved patients with primary care treatments so that they have a low cost and efficient means of reaching specialized care. Olayiwola has founded numerous non-profits and healthcare start-ups such as GIRLTALK Inc, Inspire Health Solutions LLC, and the Minority Women Professionals are MVPs Program. She has been recognized at the national and international level for her work and efforts to educate, advocate and provide healthcare to those in need. She was named Woman of the Year by the American Telemedicine Association in 2019, and received the Public Health Innovator Award from Harvard School of Public Health in 2019, as well as being named one of America's Top Family Doctors from 2007 to 2008 by the Consumers Research Council of America.
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