Massachusetts

Harvard Pilgrim Health Care is working with health care providers throughout the region on an innovative, multi-faceted plan to better coordinate behavioral and medical health care for patients. As part of this initiative, Harvard Pilgrim has made quality grants to selected providers who are working to integrate these two facets of health care. Integration is of particular interest to those providers involved in Patient Centered Medical Homes (PCMH), a model that emphasizes care coordination among a patient’s specialists and primary care providers.

A recently concluded demonstration project made meaningful progress toward introducing a "patient-centered medical home" approach at "safety net" practices serving vulnerable and underserved populations. Lessons learned in the course of developing and implementing the Safety Net Medical Home Initiative (SNMHI) are featured in a special November supplement to Medical Care.

Dr. Gina Luciano, the Associate Program Director of Internal Medicine Residency at Baystate Health, won the 2014 Primary Care Challenge on Tuesday night, following several weeks of crowd-sourced voting online. Luciano pitched her innovative plan to rework primary care residency programs, titled “Training Tomorrow’s Primary Care Physician,” to a panel of five judges and an audience of over 50 enthusiastic primary care innovators, physicians and students at Harvard Medical School.

Are we Clueless, and has Cher Horowitz finally found her Tai Frasier? Are primary care providers the cool kids now? According to Dr. Marci Nielsen, Chief Executive Officer of the Washington, DC-based Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC), primary care providers are on the up-and-up.

A few years ago it struck the D.C. region’s biggest medical insurer that the doctors who saw its members most often and knew them best got the smallest piece of the healthcare dollar. CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield spent billions on hospital procedures, drugs and specialty physicians to treat sick patients. Only one dollar in 20 went to the family-care doctors and other primary caregivers trained to keep people healthy.

The company’s move to shift that balance tells a lesser-known story of the Affordable Care Act and efforts to change the health system.

The care coordination of an AIDS patient and his HIV-positive wife managed by UMass Medical School’s Judith Steinberg, MD, MPH, is a textbook example of success using the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) model, according to a cover story in the most recent issue of Medical Economics. Dr. Steinberg (at right), clinical associate professor of medicine and deputy chief medical officer for UMass Medical School’s Commonwealth Medicine division, said that it was critical to have a behavioral health specialist immediately begin counseling the couple following their diagnosis.