Benefits of the Patient-Centered Medical Home

The Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC), in collaboration with the Milbank Memorial Fund, released its annual report titled, “The Patient-Centered Medical Home’s Impact on Cost and Quality: Review of Evidence 2013-2014.” According to PCPCC, annual report “highlights evidence from primary care PCMH initiatives taking place in both public and private markets across the country. The report looks at selected outcomes from 28 peer-reviewed studies, state government evaluations, and industry reports published between September 2013 and November 2014. The results are encouraging and demonstrate the PCMH’s positive impact on reducing cost and unnecessary health care utilization.”

From the study, “New evidence underscores improvements in cost and utilization associated with the PCMH. Since the inception of the PCPCC in 2006, the body of evidence associating the primary care PCMH with reductions in health care costs and unnecessary utilization of services continues to expand. This report builds on the existing evidence base and includes the largest number of PCMH evaluations in a single year, for a total of 28 publications. These publications come from a combination of peerreviewed literature (n=14), state PCMH program evaluations (n=7), and industry reports (n=7). The data summarized here support the assertion that the PCMH model can lead to a reduction in health care costs, inappropriate emergency department utilization, and inpatient hospitalizations. • Peer-reviewed scholarly publications. Of the 10 peer-reviewed studies that examined whether the PCMH was associated with a reduction in costs, six reported reductions (60 percent). Of the 13 studies that investigated the association between the PCMH and unnecessary utilization, 12 found a reduction in one or more measure (92 percent). • State government reports (non peer-reviewed). All seven state government evaluations reported reductions in at least one cost metric (100 percent) and six reported improvement in one or more measurement of utilization (86 percent). • Industry reports (non peer-reviewed). Six of the seven industry publications reported reductions in at least one utilization metric (86 percent) and four reported reductions in one or more cost metric (57 percent). • Quality and/or satisfaction measures. Although our inclusion criteria centered on cost and utilization measures associated with primary care PCMHs, several of these studies also reported statistically significant improvements in quality of care metrics, access to primary care services, and patient or clinician satisfaction.”