Now in its sixth year, the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Patient-Centered Medical Home designation program has influenced a transformation of care statewide as 1,422 physician practices, comprising 4,022 primary care doctors, have been designated as patient-centered medical homes for the 2014 program year. These practices care for more than 1.2 million BCBSM members in 78 of Michigan’s 83 counties. The program continues to lead the nation in size and cost savings.
Medicaid accountable care organizations (ACOs) have the potential to improve health care quality and control rising costs, particularly for complex, high-need beneficiaries. Given the prevalence of behavioral health conditions among this population and the related cost implications, coordinating behavioral health services within Medicaid ACOs may help states to dramatically improve quality of care and reap significant savings from avoidable emergency room and inpatient utilization.
To prepare the primary care workforce for the influx of new Medicaid-eligible patients established through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), this provision increases payment rates for certain primary care services to at least the level of Medicare in 2013 and 2014.
The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) model aims to transform primary care practice through the use of multidisciplinary teams and a shift from "reactive visit-based care to proactive population health management." Currently, medical home providers are reimbursed with a blend of fee-for-service payments and additional compensation for services provided outside of office visits, including care coordination. Writing in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, Harvard Medical School’s Samuel T.
Importance Interventions to transform primary care practices into medical homes are increasingly common, but their effectiveness in improving quality and containing costs is unclear.
Objective To measure associations between participation in the Southeastern Pennsylvania Chronic Care Initiative, one of the earliest and largest multipayer medical home pilots conducted in the United States, and changes in the quality, utilization, and costs of care.
The Maryland Learning Collaborative together with the Maryland Multi-Payer Program transformed 52 medical practices into patient-centered medical homes (PCMH). The Maryland Learning Collaborative developed an Internet-based 14-question Likert scale survey to assess the impact of the PCMH model on practices and providers, concerning how this new method is affecting patient care and outcomes.
Patient-centered, comprehensive, team-based, coordinated care models are a focal point of healthcare reform. The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) model aims to provide better primary care and health outcomes at a lower cost. To become a PCMH, a set of standards must be met that includes coordination of care transitions.
Accurate and reliable quality measurement is increasingly important to federal and state payment strategies. A new generation of technical infrastructure is enabling payers at both levels of government to define and identify high-value service delivery. Recent reforms, including the Affordable Care Act, are pushing payers to become more prudent purchasers of care, spurring them to implement payment strategies that reward value in the health care system.
