Article Critique on "Transforming Physician Practices to Patient-Centered Medical Homes: Lessons from the National Demonstration Project"

Healthcare delivery systems are under constant discussion as medical professionals and consumers alike seek ways to reform and improve health care. One type of delivery reform is the concept of medical homes, which emphasizes a patient-centered approach by utilizing all stakeholders to improve care and outcomes. This paper will summarize an article discussing the experimental implementation of medical home models, as well as identifying the positive and negative impacts of the transformation, and its implications for the future.

Summary

The article by Nutting et al (2011) discussed the country's first demonstration project in which physician practices were transformed into medical homes. The purpose was to assess the transformation into medical homes, and identify the lessons of the project for future reform. The project involved 36 physician practices that adopted the medical home delivery and its four crucial areas of reform: access to first-contact care, coordinated care, comprehensive care, and sustained personal relationships (Nutting et al, 2011). In an effort to deliver higher quality and lower cost care, the transformed practices embraced a patient-centered emphasis in which patients were more involved in their own care with increased access to their own health care information, and more control over their health care decisions. Additionally, the medical homes introduced improved and advanced technologies for both practitioners and patients to ease the access of health care information. The authors separated the participating practices into a facilitated intervention group, and a self-directed group, and were evaluated by the project model that consisted of 50 components over eight categories (Nutting et al, 2011). The evaluation showed that facilitated intervention practices implemented more of the project models. Most of the project models were implemented with little impact on the typical roles of practitioners, although difficulty was...