Home Sweet Medical Home

Imagine being a partner in your own health with your primary care physician and other professionals who comprise your personal health care team.

You can easily get in touch with members of your team, no matter when you need them. You and your team work together to keep you healthy by focusing on prevention through education, monitoring and regular check-ups. If you have a chronic illness like heart disease or diabetes, you take an active role, along with your team, in managing your condition. Some of your consultations with your team are “virtual” through e-mail, Web sites or home monitoring equipment. If you require specialized care, your team coordinates your visits to other physicians so you get only the tests, medications and procedures you need.

As you can see, that’s a very different model from the one most of us are familiar with, where you go to the doctor only when you’re sick. It’s different for doctors, too. They would get paid not just a standard fee for service, but also a fee for managing your care and perhaps a bonus for meeting or exceeding quality standards in their practices.

This health care model, known as a patient-centered medical home, is an idea that’s catching on across the country, and Colorado has taken a leading role in developing and testing it.

A project called the Multi-Payer, Multi-State Patient-Centered Medical Home Pilot began in spring 2009 and will continue for at least another year. It involves 16 internal medicine and family medicine practices with 51 physicians in Colorado Springs, Fort Collins and the Denver Metro area, as well as several practices in greater Cincinnati, the project’s partner region.

To be chosen for the pilot project, practices had to meet guidelines set by the National Committee for Quality Assurance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of health care. Several health plans, state and national physician organizations, hospitals and employers are also participating in the project.

The project is collecting data on the quality of clinical care provided to patients, cost, patient experience and satisfaction, and provider experience and satisfaction to evaluate the effectiveness of the patient-centered medical home model. The Colorado Clinical Guidelines Collaborative is serving as the convening organization and has helped the pilot practices with coaching and technical assistance. The project is funded by the Colorado Trust and The Commonwealth Fund. The Harvard University School of Public Health will provide an independent evaluation of its success.

Colorado’s project is producing some encouraging results and has served as a model for similar pilot projects in other states. At least 26 other projects are going on in 18 other states, and several other medical home pilot projects are being conducted in Colorado.

The medical home concept has been around since the 1960s, but it has received increasing attention as health care costs have escalated in the past decade. The Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, an organization founded in 2005 by IBM and several other large organizations to promote the idea of a medical home, has launched pilot projects in several states, including Colorado.

If you’d like to learn more about the patient-centered medical home and Colorado’s pilot project, visit these links:

http://coloradoguidelines.org/pcmh
http://www.pcpcc.net/pcpcc-pilot-projects