Having a medical home is associated with better health outcomes, such as lower rates of emergency room visits, hospitalizations, unmet needs and delays or. A medical home helps your child recover and stay healthy by connecting them to health professionals, services, education and additional help. Regardless of who coordinates, a medical home supports your child and helps you, as a parent or guardian, coordinate care. Some families have medical homes “built through a specialist's office,” others have a primary care pediatrician, and others who receive Medicaid may have that coordination through a managed care patient care specialist. A medical home combines place, process and people.
It's not a building, a house, or a hospital, but rather an approach to providing comprehensive primary care. A medical home represents an approach to pediatric healthcare in which a trusted doctor collaborates with the family to establish regular and ongoing care. Through this partnership, the primary health care professional can help family and patient access and coordinate specialized care, other health care services, educational services, home and out-of-home care, family support, and other public and private community services that are important to the overall health of the child and family. Providing a medical home means addressing the medical and non-medical needs of the child and family. Members whose health is managed within the structure of the medical home generally report greater overall satisfaction.
This becomes an important factor in the framework of health reform, as members will have more opportunities to change health plans. In this environment, the doctor's office will be able to connect electronically with the health plan and other external resources to provide the same benefits of a “true medical home,” but with significantly less financial investment and administrative expenses. Technology is the most promising means of allowing collaboration between healthcare stakeholders, which is the basis of the very concept of a medical home. Bringing a trusted medical provider into that circle to help with coordination and care can increase a family's ability to go beyond the need to juggle the many issues involved in caring for a child with special health needs. The medical home recognizes the family as a constant in a child's life and emphasizes collaboration between health professionals and families.
In recent years, the patient-centered medical home (PCMH), often referred to in its abbreviated form, the “home health care delivery model” has become one of the hottest topics in medical care. CYSHCNs who receive care in a medical home are more likely to meet other basic outcomes designed to measure and improve quality of life. The bill includes funding to implement ACOs in Medicare and Medicaid3, and the criteria for ACOs to participate in both programs have already been determined. A medical home creates a coordinated team and care plan around all of your child's medical needs.
Medical complexity, or a diagnosis that affects several systems of the body or that can be life-threatening, adds its own challenges to a medical home. In the medical home, they provide this information electronically to provider offices and establish bonus and incentive structures to obtain relevant results. An ACO is a company and a medical entity that assumes responsibility for the cost and quality of care provided to a specific population of patients and generates data on their performance. Since the PCMH will provide the coordination of care necessary for the ACO model to work, most ACOs are likely to take root in areas that have a sufficient number of medical homes. The need for a permanent source of health care, ideally a medical home for all children, has been identified as a priority for child health policy reform at the national and local levels.
The effective deployment of technical solutions can allow any medical office, regardless of its size or patient population, to successfully participate in a medical home model by establishing what is, in essence, a virtual medical home.
