Almost No Benefit of Medical Home Interventions in Community-Based Practices

The team-based, comprehensive case management approach to primary care, called the patient-centered medical home (PCMH), has been advocated as the foundation for achieving improved access and quality of care at lower cost. Researchers used a network of primary care practices in southeastern Pennsylvania (supported by six payers) to assess its value in a community-based setting.

Thirty-two primary care practices (with about 64,000 patients) that volunteered to adopt a wide range of PCMH features — performance feedback, disease-management registries and protocols, reminder systems for delivering preventive services, and electronic health records — were compared with 29 control practices (with about 56,000 patients). Intervention practices achi…