What is a Medical Home in an ACO?

In my previous blog, I mentioned the phrase “medical homes” as part of the ACO.  Well what is a Medical Home and how will that impact the way you seek out medical care for an ailment or injury?

Medical Homes are set up to promote a team care approach to care of a patient through a spectrum of disease states and across the various stages of life.  Overall coordination of care is lead by a personal physician with the patient serving as the focal point of all medical care.

The goal in the Medical Home is for a team of providers to care for a patient seamlessly and efficiently, while managing costs.  In a Medical Home a primary care physician assists patients who need specialist care, maintains electronic records of all patient/provider interactions, communicates with all of the patient’s caregivers, and tracks the patient’s progress.

How does this differ from what we are doing now?  When you have a specific ailment, how often do you seek medical attention from a specialist right off the bat?  Many of us do, we bypass our primary care physician and go directly to the specialist.  Many times the primary care physician could have managed the problem without going to a specialist, which in turn would have kept the cost down.  And by having your PCP (primary care physician) be the center of your medical care, he or she can navigate you to the proper specialists forgoing incorrect costly appointments.

ACO’s pose many questions, concerns and arguments searching for the most efficient way to delivery healthcare in the future, but this one concept seems to be an easy solution that we can all agree on. 

Michele White

Reference:

Academy Health Research Insights. Medical Homes and Accountable Care Organizations:  If We Build It, Will They Come?  2011 http://www.academyhealth.org/Publications/BriefDetail.cfm?ItemNumber=3828

Image by lseegert.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/medhome.  Retrieved from: http://lseegert.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/they-say-there%E2%80%99s-no-place-like-home/