by Ted Eytan, on 13 Jun 2007 04:09 pm
The Journey
Patient Centered Primary Care and the Medical Home
At the tail end of my vacation last week, I had the great fortune to sit in and also present at the Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative (Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative Web Site) (My Slides) meeting in Washington, DC.
“The Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative is a coalition of major employers, consumer groups, and other stakeholders who have joined with organizations representing primary care physicians to develop and advance the patient centered medical home.”
The basic components of the patient centered medical home are: Patient engagement, clinical information systems, transparency, and feedback.
What is exciting about this concept to me, originally proposed by the American College of Physicians, supported also by American Academy of Family Physicians and American Academy of Pediatrics, is that it has a nice fit within a LEAN framework that supports absolute focus on the customer, the patient. It think this represents a potentially significant and fundamental shift in the way health care leaders conceptualize the American health care system.
There is a very compelling video presentation on the site hosting the materials by Barbara Starfield, Ph.D., a recognized expert in health services, on the impact of supporting primary care models in health care. You can access it here.
In my comments, I suggested an additional component of the medical home model: the continuous improvement system. I asked the audience if they had heard of the Toyota Management System or The Toyota Way - about 60 percent raised their hands, which was very positive. I then showed a few images of our improvement events and pointed out that most of the individuals in the pictures were non-physicians, but all were involved in improvement efforts.
The impact of a national health care system that is funded around the holistic needs of the patient AND includes regular reflection and participatory improvement by all of its professionals is something that we would all welcome. I enjoyed learning from this accomplished group that we are not alone in moving in this direction, and that LEAN can gain acceptance as a system in getting us there faster.
I think it is worth following the work of this group and developments around the creation of advanced medical home practices. IBM announced that it will likely launch a pilot of an advanced medical home practice in January, 2008. Our organization has been piloting an advanced medical home since January, 2007.