Strategy for Patient-Centered Home Recruitment Under Way
The big question, according to Carole Romm, chair of the Medicaid Advisory Committee, is how to recruit people
June 30, 2011—Voluntary enrollment, increasing knowledge amongst providers and consumers, and creating a uniform message were all on the table when the Medicaid Advisory Committee discussed how to recruit patients into patient-centered primary care homes when it met last week.
“The state wants everyone to be associated with patient-centered medical homes,” said Carole Romm, committee chair and director of public affairs at Central City Concern. “The question is how we do that. If you just ask people to sign up, people don’t do it.”
There needs to be a very definite idea of what these patient-centered homes will offer in order to attract a significant number of patients, according to Dr. Rick Wopat of Samaritan Health.
It’s also important to know what these medical homes would actually look like, but that “policy hasn’t been put on the table,” said Nicole Merrithew, manager of the Office of Health Policy and Research’s Healthy Delivery Reform Unit, who urged committee members to focus on how to engage patients.
Whatever policy is developed, it needs to be consumer driven, said Meghan Caughey, Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare's senior director of peer and wellness services, so “consumers become active players.”
“That is certainly a goal I would think is worthwhile,” she said. “It’s going to be important to patients that they’re a piece of this.”
A patient-centered medical home would provide coordinated care for people on the Oregon Health Plan with the goal of offering more comprehensive, efficient and less expensive care while making certain people lead healthier lives.
Given that this population has high healthcare needs, are highly mobile and not as stable as people who are employed, peer-to-peer contact is essential, Romm emphasized..
Rhonda Busek, director of PacificSource Health Plans’ Medicaid Programs, pondered how accurate information will be conveyed to the managed care plans and the content of such information.
“A couple of features of that content that seem obvious is how does the patient-centered home work, and what are the benefits [of it],” replied Jim Russell, of Mid Valley Behavioral Health. “You need the benefits and what you can expect.”
The discussion ended with Merrithew saying that “internal work with partners” needs to be completed before her office is ready to begin communicating with providers and patients about the patient-centered medical home model.
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Medical Homes or PCMH - The success of this model will rely on implementing it as the sole model of care, meaning providers may not be driven by variety of reimbursement schemes: Fee For Service/Capitation/P4P etc - Otherwise providers will on any one day of [ambulatory] care delivery will be changing various reimbursement hats as they manage Medicaid or commercial or Medicare FFS patients.