Medical home 2.0

The Present, The Future

In the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, the expansion of patient-centered medical home pilot programs is among delivery system reforms intended to reduce costs and improve population-based health by leveraging clinical information technologies, care teams and evidence-based medical guidelines.

Conceptually, a medical home model makes sense: Improved consumer access to primary care health services and increased accountability for healthy lifestyles are foundational to a reformed health system. For primary care clinicians, the current system of volume-based incentives limits their ability to appropriately diagnose and adequately manage patient care. For consumers, lack of access to effective and clinically accurate diagnostics and therapeutics via primary care is a formula for delayed treatment, overall poor health and higher costs. The medical home model is designed to address these issues.

This is the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions’ second look at the medical home. We maintain our support for this health care innovation and encourage the continued exploration of operating models and payment mechanisms that optimize its results and provide a clear path to widespread deployment. The status quo is not sustainable; primary care is the front door to a transformed system of care in which multi-disciplinary care teams share responsibility and risk with consumers in managing outcomes and costs. The “medical home 2.0” is an advancement in the design, delivery and payment for health care services that leverages emergent characteristics of a transformed health system – shared decision-making with patients, multidisciplinary teams where all participate actively in the continuum of care, incentives for adherence to evidence-based practices and cost efficiency and health information technologies that equip members of the care team and consumers to make appropriate decisions and monitor results.

The medical home 2.0 is a promising and necessary improvement to the U.S. system of health care. It is more than a new way to pay primary care physicians; it is a new way to deliver improved health care in the U.S.
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