Medical Home Project

Pillar Chair

Barbara Walters

About the Medical Home Project Pillar

The New Hampshire Citizens Health Initiative Multi-Stakeholder Medical Home Pilot represents a collaboration among the Initiative medical home workgroup, the Center for Medical Home Improvement and the four private New Hampshire Health Plans: Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, CIGNA, Anthem, and MVP Healthcare as well as NH Medicaid. The goal of the pilot is to value, prescribe and reward medical care that is tightly coordinated and of superior quality and efficiency.  

Planning for the project began in January of 2008, with sites selected in December 2008.  Payment to the pilot sites for the two year pilot will commence on June 1, 2009. 

The eleven (11) pilot sites selected for the project represent the full spectrum of practice types and sizes, including a residency program, with geographic distribution that covers nearly the entire state, in both urban and rural settings.  The practices selected provide services for more than 39,000 commercially insured members, and almost 130,000 unique patient visits per year, or greater than 10% of the state population.  

The patient-centered medical home concept re-centers health care on the patient’s needs and priorities by providing primary, preventive, and chronic condition care that is personalized for each patient. It emphasizes the use of care coordination and health information technology, including electronic health records, to help prevent and manage chronic disease. It also features consumer conveniences such as same-day scheduling and secure e-mail communications. The medical home strengthens the patient-physician relationship by allowing the doctor and team of health professionals to spend more time with each patient and to develop and follow through on an individualized plan of care. 

Medical homes have been shown to improve health outcomes, reduce costs and improve patient, family, physician and staff satisfaction.
The practices recognized as patient-centered medical homes will receive per member per month compensation for the time and work physicians and their staff spend to provide comprehensive and coordinated services. This approach is distinctly different from the current system which solely pays for procedures and treatment of individual diseases. 

The success of the pilot will be evaluated through a rigorous, multi-state design.  It will include qualitative, quantitative and satisfaction measures, assessing impacts on utilization, both appropriate and inappropriate, cost and, quality.  The evaluation will rely on claims data from the NH Comprehensive Health Information System (CHIS), an all payer claims database, as well as direct medical chart data.

Multi-Stakeholder Patient-Centered Medical Home Pilot Participants 

For more information on this working group contact Heather Staples