on August 18, 2010 |
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Topics: Medical Oncology, Oncology, Service Lines, Medical Home, Physician Issues, Patient-Focused Care, Methodologies, Performance Improvement
I wrote this piece for last month's Oncology Insights and we have received very strong feedback on it, so I wanted to post it on the blog to ensure you all saw it as well.
Medical Oncology and the Medical Home
With the passage of the health reform law earlier this year, the concept of the medical home has gained greater traction across the country. Currently there are over 60 different medical home pilots nationally, with more emerging every week. At the Advisory Board, we formally define a medical home as a practice with the following characteristics:
- Comprehensive care delivery, ensuring complete chronic care management across a variety of conditions and preventive care including recommended vaccines, preventive tests, and lifestyle counseling
- Improved patient engagement through dedicated time for patient education and involvement in care plan and design
- Enhanced patient access to ensure providers can meet urgent care needs and answer patients' ongoing care management questions
- Coordination of care across the continuum to ensure providers are capturing and sharing a complete record of health care utilization
- Use of a care team including physicians, clinical office staff, and non-clinical office staff to ensure delivery of the goals of the medical home practice
- Implementation of a disease registry to provide the data to support panel patient management by the care team
The value of this model in primary care is clear: By engaging more proactively with chronic disease patients to manage symptoms and chart their disease progression over time, providers can reduce acute events and thus decrease resource utilization while also improving outcomes. Many of these same principles would apply to oncology, hence the emerging interest in the concept of the medical oncology medical home.
Applying this model to medical oncology
The potential for this model was first brought to our attention when a medical oncology practice in Pennsylvania, Consultants in Medical Oncology & Hematology (CMOH), became the first medical oncology practice in the nation to earn Level III recognition from the NCQA as a medical home (click here to learn more). To achieve this status, they were required to meet a host of requirements including (note: this list is not exhaustive):
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Medical Oncology and the Medical Home
