The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) is an exciting strategy that could revolutionize the whole sphere of the medical sphere. Traditionally, home care has been used for palliative care of terminal cancer patients and in geriatrics. Recently, PCMH has become increasingly common for both primary care and complex nursing care. The core of PCMH is the interaction between the health care team, the patient’s family and support, and, above all, the patient himself. These interactions can be enhanced by health information technology, such as the electronic health record (EHR) and video conferencing via iPad (Varga et al., 2017). In addition, the collection of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) will allow for feedback and adjustments. All those points may be considered as the main reasons to use this way of treatment and observation. It brings a vast amount of comfort during the process and allows to interfere with the people around the patient.
This integration is significant when considering the many complex needs of the HCT patient: navigating the Byzantine healthcare system, which often requires input and coordination from multiple specialists, including hematologists, infectious disease physicians, gastroenterologists, psychiatrists, dietitians, pharmacists, and avoiding the need for a patient’s own health care system. PCMH provides patient-centered, comprehensive, accessible, and coordinated care, as well as a systematic approach to quality and safety: these attributes are essential to the successful maintenance of patients with complicated HCT (Varga et al., 2017). This approach can reduce overall costs while maintaining or improving the quality of care.
All of these points make the use of this type of care especially attractive, even more so given the pandemic conditions in the world. Using this approach can minimize the need to leave home and potentially contract a disease that could be even more serious. However, it is worth keeping in mind that using this method does not preclude receiving professional medical care without self-treatment. Based on all of the above, it is clear that PCMH is the next step in medical care, which will improve over time.
Reference
Varga, S., Lombardi, M., & Maio, V. (2017). Improving the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) Evaluation Process Is Essential to Foster the PCMH Movement. Population Health Management, 20(1), 1–2. Web.