"Assessing and Increasing Readiness for Patient-Centered Medical Home Implementation"

Many health care institutions, health centers, and individual practitioners are familiar with the Patient-Centered Medical Home Model. Many of them know first-hand the importance of taking the best practices of successful PCMH implementations, it increases patient satisfaction, lower cost, improves staff moral, and increases patient quality of care. However, there are many challenges involved in implementing the PCMH model, from financial, workforce demands, time, and others. It is important to focus on the bigger picture, which is to improve quality of care and reduce cost. For that, practices desiring or in the beginning process of PCMH implementation should see certain "challenges" as investments. For example, staff/or physicians time to discuss the desire and need to get stared with the PCMH implementation. This is a required investment from the physician and practice part as it is an investment when coordinating PCMH implementation teams. In many situations there are practices that see the PCMH model as a burden, instead of an opportunity to be humble and take the responsibility of investing in the quality of care for their patients. It is always better to breakdown big projects into manageable and doable tasks to focus on specific areas to reach success in making changes.

The following link is an evaluation study released by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation "A new research summary based on work from the University of Michigan, in collaboration with the Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q) evaluation team, explores the readiness of primary care practices for implementing the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model, and provides guidelines for assessing, and increasing readiness."

The study reinforces the challenges in the divided arena on the Patient-Centered Medical Home Model implementation to reach optimum quality of care for patients. The study was conducted using two groups of practices 1) practices with a high score of implementation and 2) practices with the lower scores of implementation. The attitude and behavior of each group were defined by the level of engagement, motivation, and capability in the PCMH Model implementation.

One thing that I want to mention is that the study should have looked at the lack of interest and collaboration between primary care practices and other agencies that can provide support toward the PCMH implementation. For instance, there are community-based organizations looking for primary care practices to collaborate in demonstration/pilot projects on quality Improvement (QI). These demonstration projects lead to the exploration of gaps in the primary practice's system of care, such as care coordination, co-management, Electronic Medical Records, and others. This can be a great leverage for practices to take advantage.

Evaluation: Assessing and Increasing Readiness for Patient-Centered Medical Home Implementation
By: Wise CG, Alexander J, Green LA, Cohen GR and Koster C
In: Research Summary No. 9
Published: March 2012

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http://www.rwjf.org/qualityequality/product.jsp?id=74126&cid=XEM_A5817

Author:
Helen E. Dao is the President and CEO at her company Dao Management Consulting Services, Inc. (www.daoconsultingservices.com) Helen has been working on Quality Improvement projects, intercultural competence, and public health strategies development for 11 years. You can follow her on Twitter @ http://twitter.com/#!/daoconsulting and @ her blog http://daoconsultingservices.blogspot.com/