Medical Home Concept Gains Prominence Thanks to Academy’s Efforts

Effectuating the medical home concept will help lower the costs of medical care toward the reasonable goal of 67% of current costs. To save money one must spend. Primary care docs (PCP) should arrange contracts with insurers and patients without insurance under which the doc is paid a monthly fee for non-face-face services including:

Telehone and E-mail communication to the PCP with fast turn response time, including via a blackberry type device; PCP advice for the need of specialty care, and timely arrangement of referrals (for treatment) and consultation (for advice) with medical record information forwarded in a timely manner; Timely follow-up with the patient via telephone after a specialty consultation; Monitoring of consultant activities; Arrangements for special needs, such as hospice, and visits to assisted living facilities for urgent evaluation; Scientific advice to guide decision-making; Same day office visits for urgent problems; Monitoring during hospital inpatient care; and Review of costly avoidable use of health care resources.

Competing interests:   None declared