Association Between Participation in a Multipayer Medical Home Intervention and Changes in Quality, Utilization, and Costs of Care
By Mark W. Friedberg, MD, MPP; Eric C. Schneider, MD, MSc; Meredith B. Rosenthal, PhD; Kevin G. Volpp, MD, PhD; Rachel M. Werner, MD, PhD
JAMA, February 26, 2014
Abstract
Importance: Interventions to transform primary care practices into medical homes are increasingly common, but their effectiveness in improving quality and containing costs is unclear.
Objective: To measure associations between participation in the Southeastern Pennsylvania Chronic Care Initiative, one of the earliest and largest multipayer medical home pilots conducted in the United States, and changes in the quality, utilization, and costs of care.
Design, Setting, and Participants: Thirty-two volunteering primary care practices participated in the pilot (conducted from June 1, 2008, to May 31, 2011). We surveyed pilot practices to compare their structural capabilities at the pilot’s beginning and end. Using claims data from 4 participating health plans, we compared changes (in each year, relative to before the intervention) in the quality, utilization, and costs of care delivered to 64 243 patients who were attributed to pilot practices and 55 959 patients attributed to 29 comparison practices (selected for size, specialty, and location similar to pilot practices) using a difference-in-differences design.
Exposures: Pilot practices received disease registries and technical assistance and could earn bonus payments for achieving patient-centered medical home recognition by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).
Main Outcomes and Measures: Practice structural capabilities; performance on 11 quality measures for diabetes, asthma, and preventive care; utilization of hospital, emergency department, and ambulatory care; standardized costs of care.
Results: Pilot practices successfully achieved NCQA recognition and adopted new structural capabilities such as registries to identify patients overdue for chronic disease services. Pilot participation was associated with statistically significantly greater performance improvement, relative to comparison practices, on 1 of 11 investigated quality measures: nephropathy screening in diabetes (adjusted performance of 82.7% vs 71.7% by year 3, P < .001). Pilot participation was not associated with statistically significant changes in utilization or costs of care. Pilot practices accumulated average bonuses of $92 000 per primary care physician during the 3-year intervention.
Conclusions and Relevance: A multipayer medical home pilot, in which participating practices adopted new structural capabilities and received NCQA certification, was associated with limited improvements in quality and was not associated with reductions in utilization of hospital, emergency department, or ambulatory care services or total costs over 3 years. These findings suggest that medical home interventions may need further refinement.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1832540
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The Medical Home’s Impact on Cost & Quality: An Annual Update of the Evidence, 2012-2013
By Marci Nielsen, PhD, MPH, J. Nwando Olayiwola, MD, MPH Paul Grundy, MD, MPH, Kevin Grumbach, MD
Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, January 2014
A summary of key points from this year’s report include:
1. PCMH (Patient-Centered Medical Home) studies continue to demonstrate impressive improvements across a broad range of categories including: cost, utilization, population health, prevention, access to care, and patient satisfaction, while a gap still exists in reporting impact on clinician satisfaction.
2. The PCMH continues to play a role in strengthening the larger health care system, specifically Accountable Care Organizations and the emerging medical neighborhood model.
3. Significant payment reforms are incorporating the PCMH and its key attributes.
Although the evidence is early from an academic perspective, and this report does not represent a formal peer-reviewed meta-analysis of the literature, the expanding body of research provided here suggests that when fully transformed primary care practices have embraced the PCMH model of care, we find a number of consistent, positive outcomes.
http://www.pcpcc.org/resource/medical-homes-impact-cost-quality
Comment:
Don McCanne, M.D.
Imagine doing away with all primary care professionals. Patients would select a specialist depending on their specific presenting symptoms: an otolaryngologist for a cold, a surgeon for a minor laceration, a neurologist for a headache, or a gastroenterologist for an acute diarrhea. Of course, that’s ridiculous. Primary care is not a concept that we have to sell to the public. Virtually everyone accepts it as a given.
So what is the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) and how does it differ from primary care? This RAND study published in the current issue of JAMA provides enough information that we can say that, for practical purposes, there is no difference.
The primary care practices studied by RAND received a stamp of approval from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) and received bonuses for accomplishing that goal. Other than that, when compared to similar practices, they proved to be slightly better on only one of eleven quality measures and showed no reductions in utilization of hospital, emergency department, or ambulatory care services or in total costs over the 3 years of the study.
Various commentaries on this study have suggested that the reason that the study group did not do better was that the PCMH is more appropriate for people with complex, chronic problems. Only then would we expect to see improved outcomes. Really? If this effort to reinforce our primary care infrastructure is to be designed to take care of the sickest patents only, then where do the relatively healthy go? Directly to the specialists?
It has also been speculated that the practices volunteering for the study were already high-performing practices and thus did not have much room for further improvement. If that were the case, then why did the control practices do just as well?
Rather than criticizing the disappointing performance of the NCQA-recognized primary care practices, we should acknowledge that the comparison practices were providing the same efficiency and quality of care that was being provided by these selected practices. Although some might quibble with the terminology, our primary care practices are already functioning as patient-centered medical homes!
It is true that we need to reinforce primary care. The latest report from the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative suggests that we can strengthen primary care, though the improvements that they report have not been subjected to “a formal peer-reviewed meta-analysis of the literature.” But more important, the reinforcement that we urgently need is to expand the primary care infrastructure, both geographically to provide better access, and through the greater use of non-physician primary care professionals, especially nurse practitioners.
Another interesting observation about this RAND study is that it was conducted using our multi-payer system – a system well documented to be inefficient, and one that is driven more by business interests rather than patient-service interests. Although we need more than just a single payer system to improve our primary care infrastructure, it would be a gigantic and crucially important first step in establishing a single public system that would enable further improvements in primary care, where patients come first.