AAFP Advocacy Focus: Medical Home

Overview

The medical home is a care delivery model based on the Joint Principles of the Patient-centered Medical Home, the Shared Principles of Primary Care,and the five key functions of advanced primary care. These five functions are:

• access and continuity,
• planned care and population health,
• care management,
• patient and caregiver engagement; and
• comprehensiveness and coordination.

Through implementing the medical home functions, practices seek to improve the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of the care they deliver while responding to each patient’s unique needs and preferences.

Why We Fight

The medical home represents a unique, critical opportunity to center U.S. health care on primary care, and the AAFP is working to implement this vital initiative.

To fully achieve its potential, the Academy believes that the medical home model requires fundamental reform of the payment system. The AAFP therefore advocates for new payment mechanisms that can support family physicians in their efforts to manage, direct, and monitor high-quality preventive, acute, and chronic care.

The AAFP also has consistently backed congressional actions aimed at bringing features of the medical home to beneficiaries of federally supported health care programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE, and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.

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