Medical home model
Advocacy and practice for family physicians
New payment mechanisms are needed to support family physicians to position their practices as medical homes.
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
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 advocate for the medical home initiative
The medical home represents a unique, critical opportunity to center U.S. health care on primary care, and the Academy is working to implement this vital initiative.
To fully achieve its potential, the AAFP believes that the medical home model requires fundamental reform of the payment system. The Academy 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.