Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH)

I recently had an opportunity to interview James L. Holly, M.D., CEO and one of the founding partners of Southeast Medical Associates LLP, (SETMA), a multi-specialty clinic located in Beaumont, Texas that is an early adopter of electronic health records. His vision, and the accomplishments of his organization on EHR, hit home for me the huge potential of EHR to improve patient care.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based New England Healthcare Institute (NEHI) recently released an issue brief, “From Evidence to Practice: Making CER Findings Work for Providers and Patients,” which detailed the hurdles and policy choices facing leaders in comparative effectiveness research, in their efforts to widely disseminate comparative effectiveness research (CER) findings. Given the provisions in the federal healthcare reform legislation, called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), passed by Congress and signed by President Obama in March, that will establish the creation of a federal Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to identify research priorities and conduct research comparing the clinical effectiveness of medical treatments, NEHI's issue brief certainly provides a timely look at the challenges ahead in this dynamic area.

Indeed, says the report, between now and 2015, the year after some of the most important health insurance reforms are scheduled to take effect, the shortage of doctors across all specialties will quadruple. The association says its previous estimate of a nationwide shortage of 39,600 physicians will more likely approach a shortage of 63,000, with a shortage of 33,100 physicians in such specialties as cardiology, oncology, and emergency medicine.

Jack Kowitt Jack Kowitt The new healthcare is bringing together disparate elements of planning and activity as never before. Twenty years ago, building a hospital was a relatively straightforward process, based on decades of tradition and precedence. Certainly, pioneering hospital executives and clinicians were evolving toward a variety of concepts around the patient-centered hospital, improved clinician workflow, and other laudable innovations. But the core physical plant was fundamentally familiar to building contractors in the same way it might have been 50 years prior.