Having established a firm foundation by providing over two decades of patient-centered care, the medical home model is poised for a makeover, expanding into medical neighborhoods and opening the door to specialists’ enhanced role in care coordinationtwo new metrics documented in the seventh comprehensive Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) survey by the Healthcare Intelligence Network (HIN).
Here are nine benchmarks gleaned from the 2014 PCMH survey:
- The annual percentage of respondents implementing the medical home model continues to rise, with a high of 58 percent reporting PCMH adoption, up from 52 percent in 2012, when the survey was last conducted.
- The percentage of respondents with at least a fifth of patients assigned to medical homes more than doubled in the last two years, from 27 to 50 percent.
- Today’s medical home is especially welcoming to Medicaid beneficiaries, who were targeted by only 3 percent of medical homes in 2012 but now are included in 37 percent of respondents’ patient-centered approaches.
- Prepared to take their medical homes to the next level of care in the year to come, almost half—48 percent—have joined or expect to join a medical home neighborhood, defined by TransforMED℠ as “a strong foundation of transformed primary care practices aligned with health systems and specialists to ensure that care is maximally coordinated and managed.”
- At the same time, 37 percent of 2014 respondents identified practice transformation, or the process of adopting the attributes of the patient-centered medical home model, as the most formidable challenge of medical home creation.
- In new metrics from this year’s survey, nearly half of respondents (46 percent) include specialists in their patient-centered medical homes.
- With an eye toward care coordination, the inclusion of case managers in medical homes jumped from 56 percent in 2012 to 76 percent in 2014.
- Today’s medical homes are a little more crowded, with three-quarters of respondents reporting 21 or more physicians participating, up from 58 percent in 2012.
- Undaunted by recent studies to the contrary, all 2014 respondents with medical homes believe the model can reduce cost and improve care delivery.
Excerpted from 2014 Healthcare Benchmarks: The Patient-Centered Medical Home.