Medical home

The Medical Home or Patient Centered Medical Home is a holistic approach to primary care that treats the whole person, not just the symptom or disease that brings you into a doctor's office. It is a team of providers, lead by a personal physician focused on the whole patient, coordinating and integrating all aspects of the healthcare system including chronic disease management, long term care, hospital and specialty care and hospice or end of life care. The patient's primary physician is responsible for all decisions made about your care, which gives the patient one person to turn to with questions or concerns about their health. The system is designed to prevent many doctors flying blind when trying to coordinate a patient's care. If a patient is seeing several specialists, a primary care physician and two or three pharmacists there is no guesswork involved for any of the participants in choosing the most appropriate interventions. The Medical Home concept was introduced in 1967 by the American Academy of Pediatrics, referring to a centralized location for a child's medical record. In 2002, the concept was expanded to " accessible, continuous, comprehensive, family-centered, coordinated, compassionate, and culturally effective care"1 A standardized, interoperable electronic health record will be important to the success of a medical home, as coordinating and integrating many different providers and stakeholders in the healthcare needs of each patient will require accurate, timely and complete information to truly be successful.

1Joint Principles of the Patient Centered Medical Home, American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American College of Physicians (ACP), American Osteopathic Association (AOA), February 2007, http://www.pcpcc.net/content/joint-principles-patient-centered-medical-home http://www.pcmhri.org/ http://www.emmisolutions.com/medicalhome/transformed/english.html

Submitted by (Nicole Newland)