The need for comprehensive patient care influenced the development of various health delivery models. One of the examples is Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH), which is aimed at improving primary care by taking a whole-person orientation and coordinating all health activities through a patient’s primary care physician. Healthcare providers have been able to elevate the advantages of PCMH by incorporating telehealth. Telemedicine is providing healthcare services remotely through the means of information technology and modern telecommunications systems. This paper will explore the benefits and challenges of mixing telehealth with PCMH and discuss how the combination of these two models is shaping patient-provider relationships.
PCMH has become a trending topic in healthcare because of its benefits both to patients and to providers. Patients receive value-based care through PCMH and develop a solid relationship with associated health workers, whereas health providers can reduce readmissions by almost 20% (John et al., 2020). The primary benefit of telehealth is the ability of a patient to receive care at any location remotely. The main challenge of PCMH is providing appropriate training for health workers (Patient-centered medical home 101, 2015). It is also difficult and expensive to shift from a traditional health delivery model to PCMH (Benefits of NCQA, 2019). Telemedicine challenges are similar – it requires substantial investments in the beginning and appropriate training for health workers (DiCarlo et al., 2016). Despite these struggles at the start, health providers may switch to the PCMH model because of an incentive to lower operational costs in the future and improve the quality of provided care. Telehealth is often integrated into the delivery process because it allows physicians to monitor their patients’ well-being continually and provide crucial health-related information.
Statistical data shows that PCMH reduces both healthcare costs and inpatient hospital days. The number of emergency department visits is also reduced by more than 12% (Benefits of NCQA, 2019). Patient satisfaction deteriorates when there is operational inefficiency (Ko et al., 2019). Patients often provide positive feedback regarding PCMH, which may hint that the model favorably affects operational efficiency (Benefits of NCQA, 2019). It has been established that PCMH reduces the overall healthcare costs for beneficiaries (Benefits of NCQA, 2019). Therefore, PCMH augmented by the possibilities offered by telemedicine may become the desired health delivery model for both patients and providers.
It is mandatory to ensure that patients’ personally identifiable health-related information is safe and cannot be tampered with. In the context of PCMH, information security is essential because health data is accessed by a variety of workers that are associated with a patient. Telehealth contributes to PCMH by providing means for seamless communication between patients and providers and ensuring that health-related information is secured. It also reduces the costs of PCMH by allowing providers to deliver most of the services remotely (Benefits of NCQA, 2019). The combination of PCMH and telemedicine has augmented care coordination (DiCarlo et al., 2016). When a primary care physician is always connected with other health workers, and updated information is delivered instantaneously, health providers can offer more coordinated care (John et al., 2020). The landscape of patient-provider relationships is also affected significantly. With the PCMH model and telehealth, patients are serviced by the same group of health workers throughout the whole process or life journey.
References
Benefits of NCQA patient-centered medical home recognition. (2019). National Committee for Quality Assurance. Web.
DiCarlo, L. A., Weinstein, R. L., Morimoto, C. B., Savage, G. M., Moon, G. L., Au‐Yeung, K., & Kim, Y. A. (2016). Patient‐centered home care using digital medicine and telemetric data for hypertension: Feasibility and acceptability of objective ambulatory assessment. The Journal of Clinical Hypertension, 18(9), 901-906.
John, J. R., Tannous, W. K., & Jones, A. (2020). Effectiveness of a patient-centered medical home model of primary care versus standard care on blood pressure outcomes among hypertensive patients. Hypertension Research, 7(215), 1-11.
Ko, D. G., Mai, F., Shan, Z., & Zhang, D. (2019). Operational efficiency and patient‐centered health care: A view from online physician reviews. Journal of Operations Management, 65(4), 353-379.
Patient-centered medical home 101: General Overview [PowerPoint slides]. Web.