Medical Home Performance Metrics for Employers

For decades, employers have been among the first to test the waters in new health care design, implementing creative employee benefit structures in an effort to improve the value of health care delivered to employees—in effect, to balance the quality and cost equation. In recent years, many employers have embraced advanced primary care models and the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) in their latest efforts to improve value; some employers are successfully linking value-based benefit design in those innovative programs.

While many case examples and a number of well-designed evaluations have measured the outcomes of these efforts, a structured and scalable metrics set that allows employers to evaluate the impact of these programs has been lacking. And although robust efforts are now underway to measure the overall impact of the medical home using patient clinical outcomes and cost or utilization indicators, these also lack the capability to measure other aspects of vital importance to employers, such as the effects on absenteeism, “presentee-ism” and employee productivity.

This report is an effort to address that gap. It puts forward a set of health and productivity metrics that can be used by employers and their supplier partners in several ways. Using the information presented here, employers can gain a comprehensive understanding of the value of health to employers and can put to use a set of metrics that allows comparison of programs from employer to employer. The goal is that, by using this common metrics set, employers will disseminate their own achievements in a comparable, understandable way and, in future years, more employers will be able to make the case for PCMH implementation.