The first thing patients probably notice when walking into the new doctors offices at Greater Baltimore Medical Center is there is no waiting room.
Patients go directly to an exam room, where doctors, nurses and other staff are supposed to cycle in during a half-hour appointment. All supplies are on hand, as are electronic medical records, to ensure that people leave with any needed prescriptions or referrals to specialists.
The design is patterned after one used by a Seattle medical system, which modeled it after Toyota's production system.
Remember patients? They are a driver in healthcare transformation—perhaps the most important one.
The Health IT and Quality Exchange that HealthLeaders Media held in La Jolla, California, last week for CMOs, CIOs, and CMIOs was eye-opening on a number of fronts.
The ideas, successes, and challenges that the gathered healthcare leaders shared in our small group sessions illustrated that changing a workflow or a process isn't nearly as important as changing an organization's focus from physicians and payers to patients.
But some doctors are trying to streamline the process and help the patient save time and money.
It’s called Patient-Centered Medical Home and two physicians stopped by FOX8 on Tuesday to talk about it — one physician with Eagle Physicians, the other with Triad Healthcare Network.
Eagle is the first medical group in the area to be PCMH-certified and this new way of caring for patients has a lot of advantages to offer.
How can providers overcome the challenges of creating the patient-centered medical home?
There are a lot of good things to be said for the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) model, which has been credited with reducing healthcare costs, boosting the delivery of preventative services, and improving care coordination with patients who may have complex chronic disease management needs. But transforming the average healthcare organization into a PCMH and achieving the official designation can be a challenging proposition.
Why should providers consider the PCMH model, and what barriers might stand in their way?
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.
This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Marci Nielsen, Chief Exectutive Officer of the Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative, a consortium of over a thousand stakeholders across the health care industry dedicated to promoting the comprehensive care provided in Patient Centered Medical Homes to improve primary care delivery.
For the past ten months on Health Affairs Blog, we’ve been discussing the evidence for different models of payment reform, examining everything from pay for performance to nonpayment. But no discussion of payment reform is complete without addressing benefit and network designs and how they can help or hinder various payment reforms. When the right payment method is paired with the right benefit and/or network design, they can work together to help reduce costs and improve care.
Highmark Inc.'s Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) program, which launched in October 2012, is showing positive results with statistical improvements in patient care, according to company data.
Facing the fact that just 5 percent of the patient population was responsible for nearly half of its spending, one health organization has tried some fairly radical changes.
In Utah, Intermountain Healthcare decided to address the problem with primary care in an attempt to keep these most vulnerable patients from falling through the cracks.
