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As part of its strategic plan, Partners HealthCare is incorporating the patient-centered medical home model, like the one used at BWH’s new practice on South Huntington Avenue, into its primary care redesign.
“Partners HealthCare has made a decision that a transformation to a patient-centered medical home is important for all of its primary care practices,” said Lisa Whittemore, department administrator for the Brigham and Women’s Physicians Organization and a member of Partners HealthCare’s Primary Care Steering Committee, a group of senior level primary care leadership staff from across the Partners entities that was charged with defining a new strategy for primary care. “Studies have shown that a strong primary care base is an integral component not only to improving the health of our patients, but also to increasing the value of that care by reducing costs.”
The Goal
Partners has set a goal that 60 percent of its primary care practices will receive official recognition through the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) as a patient-centered medical home by 2013, with the remainder of the practices well on their way toward the transformation at that time. The medical home is not a physical space, but a concept.
“What we’re really talking about is considering a different way to deliver care to our patients,” said Whittemore. “The patient-centered medical home is a way to move to team-based care. There is a team of people who are responsible, with the physician, for providing comprehensive care to patients, and that care is based on what the patient’s needs are.”
Evolution toward the patient-centered medical home model will help to improve quality outcomes and access to health care for new and existing patients, boost provider and staff satisfaction and reduce inpatient admissions, readmissions, cost and utilization of the Emergency Department.
Making the Change
Implementing a new way of providing care is no easy task—something the Primary Care Steering Committee is well-aware of. Currently, primary care is managed at the local practice level. Different practices use different electronic health records, and individual entities make their own decisions to address the business needs of a practice, including the selection of vendors. Not only does this increase system costs for infrastructure development, but it also creates redundancies—for example, multiple practices will create patient education materials with the same information—and it makes it difficult to compare successes and best practices across all Partners entities.
The introduction of a single, efficient way of providing care to patients will help address many of those issues. However, implementation at sites across the network will require careful planning to determine what components of the change will be made at the Partners system level, and what components will happen at a local practice level.
At BWH, efforts are well underway to bring the patient-centered medical home model to primary care practices.
“We have been conducting assessments in our practices, and have been working with hospital leadership to ensure that we have support to move to this team-based model of care,” said Joseph Frolkis, MD, PhD, director of Primary Care at BWH, who has been working with all the BWH sites to develop and implement a strategic plan that embodies the principles of the patient-centered medical home.
The new practice on South Huntington Avenue is a crucial first step.
“We are establishing this innovative practice to be a ‘learning laboratory,’” Frolkis said. “We will use the practice’s successes to help our other sites as they chart their own course toward team-based care. The practice will also be a training site for residents in the BWH Internal Medicine Program.”