Community Health of Central Washington is taking part in a two year long Patient- Centered Medical Home Collaborative
Patient-Centered Medical Home
To view a presentation explaining the Patient Centered Medical Home concept in your choice of English or Spanish
A medical home is a practice that provides all your routine and preventive medical care and guides you through the system when you need specialty care or other services. They know you over time and work as a team from the receptionist to the doctor to provide your care. They use an electronic health record so they can access your information wherever they are taking care of you.
What is Patient-Centered Care?
In the past medical care tended to be at the convenience of the doctor and the office staff. Office hours were based on the interests of the doctor, care plans were decided by the doctor and dictated to the patient to follow, and patients weren’t expected to ask questions or offer input. Patient-centered means services are provided at a time and in a way that is convenient for the patient when possible. That means such things as same day appointments, evening and weekend hours, electronic communication, and phone visits. It means involving the patient in the discussion of their problems, test results, options for treatment and plans so they can care for themselves. The medical team becomes a resource and guide for the patient, allowing patients to care for themselves.
How does new technology fit into this kind of care?
Not only does the practice have an electronic health record to track patient’s care, but they communicate with patients electronically through email and Web pages and whatever else becomes available in the future. Patients can make appointments, check lab results and receive messages about their health care through electronic means instead of playing phone tag or waiting for the mail.
What kind of care can I expect to have in a Medical Home?
All of your personal care needs will be taken care of in a medical home but much of the emphasis will be on preventive care. At every visit consideration will be given to your immunization status, follow up of chronic conditions, and tests that may need to be done. There may also be nurses monitoring your chronic illnesses and scheduling you for visits or treatments as needed. There may be pharmacists who are monitoring your medications, possible interactions between medications, and follow up visits or tests that may be needed for those medicines.
What is my part and all of this?
It is your responsibility to communicate with your team of providers about changes in your medication, your health, and any symptoms that you may be having. You and your health care team will set goals for you that will help improve your health. You will need to talk about problems you are having in meeting these goals to improve your health. It is important that you understand what treatments are being recommended and that you have a discussion with your care team about those. Unlike old systems where the doctor told you what was going to happen without any discussion, it is now a joint decision. It is important that you ask questions and understand and agree with plans that are made. Once plans have been made, it is then your responsibility to comply with them or discuss with your provider if for some reason you are not complying.
Community Health of Central Washington is taking part in a two year long patient- centered medical home collaborative. We are piloting several projects involved with medical homes and making corrections to processes until we find what works. We then expand those to the rest of our clinics.
Currently we have open access scheduling which means that you can get an appointment within a few days of calling. We also have two chronic care management nurses working at our site at Central Washington Family Medicine. They are piloting ways to help patients with chronic illnesses take better care of themselves. We have an electronic medical record although it does not have all the features we would like. We're exploring other possible electronic health records that will aid us in meeting many of the goals of a patient-centered medical home.
We have systems in place to recall patients who need mammograms and Pap smears, but with a new electronic medical record we hope to increase the number of preventive services we are following. Although we are working on developing our webpage, we do not yet have a patient portal allowing two-way communication. We have plans in the future to develop e-mail communication capabilities with patients, but for security reasons that is not yet in place. We hope that all our providers are becoming more sensitive to involving patients in the development of their care plans and compliance with those plans. We welcome your feedback and suggestions and comments on how we are doing, other things that would make our practice more helpful to you, and meet your needs better.