Medical Home Accredidation Process Now in Place

The Patient Centered Medical Home is a medical practice that facilitates a partnership between individual patients, their personal physicians, and when appropriate, the patient’s family. Care is facilitated by information technology, health information exchange and other means to assure that patients get the indicated care at the time and in the way that they need and want it, in a culturally appropriate manner.

The concept of the personal Medical Home reflects input from the American College of Physicians (ACP), American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Osteopathic Association (AOA).

Now the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) has released standards for patient-centered medical homes. This means that health care providers and purchasers now have a means to recognize these practices and assess the add value added to patient care.

At present, few physician offices in primary care specialties, would likely qualify for recognition as a patient-centered medical home under the new NCQA standards. In spite of this fact, however, there is ample evidence that the availability of primary care is crucial to quality health care outcome, and more efficient care. The irony is that primary care is rapidly disappearing from the health care scene, since it not not nurtured and properly paid for.

There is widespread agreement that primary care is in crisis. Medical students often do not choose to practice primary care medicine. Existing doctors are often overwhelmed and patients aren't satisfied. Insurers say they are disappointed with its cost and quality.

The Patient Centered Medical home provides a way to change the status quo by enabling physicians to provide comprehensive primary care through stronger partnerships with their patients. Those that choose to integrate elements of this new model into their practices now have a mechanism to prove this distinction to patients and insurers. In order for these enhanced services to be sustainable, however, this designation must be recognized and rewarded by payers.

I ask all insurers to quickly develop products that support this effort. The time is now. We do not need another set of expectations for primary care physicians that are unfunded.

Why does an organized approach to health care matter ?

In a recently reported study in the journal Health Affairs, supported by The Commonwealth Fund, researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine determined that the United States ranked last among 19 industrialized countries on a measure of preventable deaths.

The study, "Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis," compared rates of "amenable mortality" before age 75. This means death from causes that are preventable with timely and effective health care. Other nations improved dramatically between the two study periods, 1997-98 and 2002-03, while the U.S. improved only slightly on the measure. Previously, the U.S. had ranked 15th among the 19 countries.

This measure of preventable deaths is a valuable indicator of health system performance, because it measures what we care about most, namely, is our health care effective? The measures include causes such as appendicitis and hypertension, as well as illnesses that can be detected early with effective screenings, such as cervical or colon cancer.

The authors state that if the U.S. had achieved the average rate of the three top-performing countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths annually by the end of the study period. The top performing countries were France, Japan, and Australia, all of which have various forms of organized, universal coverage for their populations.