Are CMS ’s “Medical Homes” Underfunded or Unfocused?

By KIP SULLIVAN “[We are supposed to gather information from patients] prior to the physician going into the room. It doesn’t happen. I’m going to be honest – the reality … is … we also are responsible for telephone triage, walk-in emergencies, diabetic meter teaching, I mean, the list goes on and on.” (Brackets in the original) That is a quote from an interview with a “care coordinator” for a “medical home” in Minnesota. Minnesota is one of the eight states that participated in the Multi-Payer Advanced Primary Care Practice (MAPCP) Demonstration, which is one of three experiments CMS has conducted testing the “patient-centered medical home” (PCMH) concept. The quote appears in a report  published by the University of Minnesota in February 2016. (p. 75) In this three-part series, I am addressing the question, What can we learn from the latest report from CMS about the MAPCP demo? The report in question is the second-year evaluation  of the demo which CMS released with zero publicity on May 11, 2016. That evaluation reported that PCMHs have had virtually no effect on the cost or quality of medical care given to Medicare beneficiaries (with the possible exception of Vermont, where PCMHs lowered costs not counting CMS subsidies to PCMHs, but had little effect on quality. [1] Evaluations of the other two CMS “medical home” experiments have reached the same conclusion (see Table 2 of this Kaiser Family Foundation report  and my comment here...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs