A study released Thursday on the Health Affairs website documents how far small- and medium-sized physicians’ practices have to go to create patient-centered medical homes. Under this model of care, primary care doctors manage all of a patient’s care and coordinate with the specialists. The Affordable Care Act encourages model homes as having potential to reduce costs, improve health and undo much of the fragmented and confusing maze many patients face today.
The new study examined data on 1,344 practices with fewer than 20 doctors each to see how many had adopted processes that are crucial to medical homes, including assignment of nurse managers to severely ill patients, adoption of electronic medical records and receipt of regular feedback from patients. On average, the practices in the study only followed 21.7 percent of these medical home protocols. The smaller the practice, the fewer were adopted, the study found.
The authors write:
One finding that surprised the authors: practices serving lots of minority or poor patients weren’t less likely to be using medical home practices.
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