New Health Care Purchasing Guide Promotes Medical Home

The Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, or PCPCC, has unveiled a purchaser guide to encourage large buyers of health care to adopt the patient-centered medical home as part of their health care plans.

The 37-page booklet, which was released during a PCPCC stakeholders meeting here on July 16, serves as both an educational tool and an informative guide, explaining how health care purchasers can readily make the patient-centered medical home a cornerstone of their health care plans.

The guide is divided into sections that define the patient-centered medical home, outline its core concepts and explain why it is a wise investment for purchasers of health care. The booklet also lays out strategies for purchasers to follow to adopt the medical home and provides sample insurance contract language to help purchasers jump-start that process. The guide was developed by the PCPCC's Center for Benefits Redesign, one of four working groups of the collaborative. The AAFP is a founding member of the collaborative.

"We, as large employers, used to think of ideas and throw them over the fence at the providers and the health care plans and say, 'Implement this -- this is what we want to buy,'" said Paul Grundy, M.D., M.P.H., chair of the PCPCC and director of health care technology and strategic initiatives at IBM, during the stakeholders meeting.

The purchaser guide represents the first time health care professionals, health care plans and consumers all have collaborated on a purchasing document, giving the booklet a multisided perspective that other guides lack, Grundy said. Moreover, the document is aligned with the joint principles of the patient-centered medical home (3-page PDF: About PDFs) adopted by the AAFP, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians and the American Osteopathic Association, making it a powerful tool that can drive systematic change, Grundy added.