Patient-Centered Medical Home

Last week I attended the Health Care System Transformation: The Patient-Centered Medical Home (35 KB, .pdf) conference held at Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise, Idaho.  The conference included talks by:

• Ted Epperly, M.D., FAAFP – President of the American Academy of Family Physicians & Program Director and CEO of Family Medicine Residency of Idaho
• Elizabeth Stewart, Ph.D. – Research Analyst for TransforMED
• Richard Paris, M.D. – St. Luke’s Family Medicine – Wood River
• Paul Grundy, M.D., MPH, FACOEM, FACPM – IBM’s Director of Healthcare, Technology and Strategic Initiatives & President of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative

As one can gather by the conference title, it focused on the concept of the patient-centered medical home.  According to the joint principles developed by the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American College of Physicians (ACP), and the American Osteopathic Association (AOA),  a patient-centered medical home:

“…is an approach to providing comprehensive primary care for children, youth and adults. The PC-MH is a health care setting that facilitates partnerships between individual patients, and their personal physicians, and when appropriate, the patient’s family.”

The joint principles (37 KB, .pdf) describe seven characteristics of patient-centered medical homes, including:

• Personal physician
• Physician directed medial practice
• Whole person orientation
• Care is coordinated and/or integrated
• Quality and safety
• Enhanced access
• Payment

Overall, I found the conference to be a worthwhile experience and a nice complement to the current literature I’ve been reading on the topic – something I plan to discuss in a future post.

I also learned a couple new things and had one of my strong assumptions affirmed, including:

• IBM is a strong advocate of the patient-centered medical home.  Also, they have recently published a white paper on the topic entitled, “Patient-Centered Medical Home: What, Why and How?”
• There are companies, like TransforMED, who understand the importance of designing the health care system to meet the needs of patients and that “Technology is NOT ‘Plug & Play’.”
• While headway is being made, there is still an acute need for human factors and ergonomics professionals to assist the health care community by lending their expertise on designing people-centered systems so that the future promises of a reformed health care system can be fully realized.