From Medical Home to Health Home

Excerpt

To the Editors:—There are numerous ongoing pilot projects evaluating the patient-centered medical home.1 While achieving a designation of “medical home” can be challenging for many providers, the concept is hardly transformative—after all, the medical home model merely describes a higher quality of primary care. Networking individual medical home practices through the sharing of business functions or clinical management resources can lead to greater efficiency in care delivery.2 Even greater potential exists in integrating primary care with other medical services to create organized delivery systems for defined populations.3 Nonetheless, while the likely health improvements attainable through such integrated medical care systems are significant, they are relatively modest. …