- By John Fraser, MEDNET

A Medical Home can have a significant impact on patients, especially patients with a chronic (or multiple) conditions, as well as the patient’s family. Healthcare organizations need suitable technology solutions to enable the secure sharing of patient information across organizational boundaries, to automate workflows, to comply with regulations, and to manage patients with chronic conditions outside the acute care setting.  Enter the Medical Home, or Patient-Centered Medical Home.

But what is a Medical Home exactly? As defined by The National Committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA), “The Patient Centered Medical Home is a health care setting that facilitates partnerships between individual patients, and their personal physicians, and when appropriate, the patient’s family. Care is facilitated by registries, information technology, health information exchange and other means to assure that patients get the indicated care when and where they need and want it in a culturally and linguistically appropriate manner.”

Living with multiple or chronic conditions can be difficult for patients.  Patients and providers need quick and easy access to health information to better understand and manage chronic conditions. Provider organizations are committed to helping patients live a happier and healthier life by helping them manage these chronic conditions outside the acute care setting. With chronic care delivery being fragmented by patients visiting multiple care providers at different locations, it is a challenge to deliver the right care to patients.  Lack of current, relevant patient information across the different care facilities also adds to the challenge.

A Medical Home can help providers manage patients with specific conditions, manage chronic diseases, coordinate multiple caregivers, and help collect quality information.  A Medical Home can track patients across care settings and over time to improve patient outcomes and quality.

A Medical Home can be deployed as a separate service for individual projects, or integrated with other, existing services and Health Information Exchanges.   In fact, Medical Homes can be fully integrated and supported by the Nationwide Health Information Network, or NHIN.  Therefore, Medical Homes should be considered in a provider’s HIT roadmap, as well as the roadmap of services and integrated/supported offerings by a Health Information Exchange.

Next month, we will dive deeper into Medical Homes, use-cases, and goals of the interoperable Medical Home.