Group Health recently published remarkable cost and quality improvements with their work on the medical home.
There has been a lot written recently about the "medical home".This is the term popularized to describe the structure of the relationship between the primary care physician and the patient.The theory being that if the outpatient visit was re designed to incorporate better focus on patient's educational, clinical, social, and behavioral needs that quality would improve and costs would go down.One of the major provisions in the recently passed health care legislation is medical home pilots to be administered by CMS.
I don't like the term medical home as it implies the system should be focused on the doctor and staff vs. the patient condition.In focus groups the AARP has conducted this concern is voiced by patients as well.But be that as it may, we do need to redesign the care process to better meet outpatient care needs. There is evidence that many readmissions to the hospital could be avoided if better coordination existed of the patient condition. The challenge for providers is to redesign and re package existing resources so that hundreds of millions of dollars of unnecessary hospital care can be averted.
Group Health of Puget Sound has been on the lean journey for four years.They are also a member of the Healthcare Value Leaders Network. They have published an article in Health Affairs in May which shows a $10 dollar per member per month reduction in premium expense for patients accessing their redesigned primary care clinic which they call their medical home model. Using lean to redesign their primary care clinics they have created the future state value stream in a way that is adding better value to customers.This doesn't surprise me as I have visited Group Health twice and spoken to the Family Doctor who has championed much of this work. His passion and commitment to redesign care is exciting.and to watch the staff in front of their visual tracking centers expertly describe the problems they face and the improvements they have made is inspiring. This is some of the first evidence that redesigning outpatient care can reap huge cost savings while improving quality.
Congratulations Group Health! Click below to read the article.
Reid-FF
Leave a Reply