BELLEVUE, Wash. - It's a new way of practicing medicine at Group Health Cooperative.
A one-year pilot project at its Factoria Medical Center is the first to demonstrate benefits to patients and staff when a primary care practice adopts a "patient-centered medical home" model.
The model gives patients more time with doctors, more preventive care and improved collaboration among caregivers.
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At the Factoria Medical Center, Group Health hired more physicians and staff to create a medical team and it reduced the number of patients for each primary care doctor from 2,300 to 1,800.
Doctors like Eric Seaver say it allows them to spend more time with each patient and gives them time to contact patients through e-mail and phone calls.
"Patients find it more convenient, it reduces driving around trying to get from one thing to another because we can communicate with other things that might require a visit," said Seaver.
The initial increase in staff was an investment, but after one year, Group Health recouped the costs.
"But what we found, in very short order, we were able to reduce the use of other services downstream like emergency room and that reduction in emergency room use caused medical home to pay for itself," explained Robert Reid, MD, PhD.
After one year, researchers compared a random sample of the 9,200 patients at Group Health's medical home to a control group. At one year, patients at the medical home had 29 percent fewer emergency room visits, 11 percent fewer hospitalizations that primary care can prevent, and 6 percent fewer in-person visits.
The findings will be published in the September 2009 issue of American Journal of Managed Care.
Impressed by the return on investment, Group Health is expanding the medical home model from its Factoria medical center in Bellevue to all 26 of its medical centers.
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