Aspects of the Patient-centered Medical Home currently in place: initial findings from preparing the personal physician for practice.
OBJECTIVE
The Patient-centered Medical Home (PCMH) is a central concept in the evolving debate about American health care reform. We studied family medicine residency training programs' continuity clinics to assess baseline status of implementing PCMH components and to compare implementation status between community-based and university training programs.


METHODS
We conducted a survey 24 continuity clinics in 14 residency programs that are part of the Preparing the Personal Physicians for Practice (P(4)) program. We asked questions about aspects of P(4) that had been already implemented at the beginning of the P(4) program. We defined high implementation as aspects that were present in >50% of clinics and low implementation as those present in <50% of clinics. We compared features at university-based and community-based clinics.


RESULTS
High areas of implementation were having an electronic health record (EHR), fully secured remote access, electronic patient notes/scheduling/billing, chronic disease management registries, and open-access scheduling. Low areas of implementation included hospital EHR with computerized physician order entry, asynchronous communication with patients, ongoing population-based QA using EHR, use of preventive registries, and practice-based research using EHR. Few differences were noted between university- and community-based residency programs.


CONCLUSIONS
Many features of the PCMH were already established at baseline in programs participating in P(4).
Carney
Patricia A
PA
Department of Family Medicine, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, OR 97239, USA. carneyp@ohsu.edu
Eiff
M Patrice
MP
Saultz
John W
JW
Douglass
Alan B
AB
Tillotson
Carrie J
CJ
Crane
Steven D
SD
Jones
Samuel M
SM
Green
Larry A
LA
D004059:Diffusion of Innovation; D005194:Family Practice / Q000193:education; D018166:Health Care Reform; D019538:Health Care Surveys; D006801:Humans; D007396:Internship and Residency; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D018802:Patient-Centered Care / Q000458:organization & administration*