OnSiteClinics.Org

Federal Government Gets in the PCMH Game

On-site clinics have always used the Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model.  Having one primary care provider coordinate all the patient’s care, records, test results, and follow-up is just good medicine.  But now, even the Federal Government is sitting up and taking notice of this concept.  CMS announced that it is initiating a demonstration project through its new Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation which will include Medicare, Medicaid, and other payers in multiple states to “evaluate the effectiveness of having physicians and other health care professionals work in a more integrated fashion across the health care system.”    The project itself is hoped to include as many as 1,200 medical homes and serve up to 1,000,000 Medicare recipients. 

Per Donald Berwick, M.D. (CMS Administrator), “For too long, health care in the United States has been fragmented. . . Payment systems often fail to reward providers for coordinating care and keeping their patients healthy, reinforcing this fragmentation” (emphasis added).  We can only hope that the work already done by employer-managed healthcare experts will be one of the systems they include in their evaluation.  Why do we keep trying to re-invent the wheel?