California Healthline Explains Why It is OK that a JAMA Study Found No Savings in Medical Homes

The patient-centered medical home model seems to make intuitive sense as a way to reduce waste in health care. Therefore, it came as a shock to many when the Journal of the American Medical Association published research showing that adopting this model actually didn’t make much of a difference in costs or outcomes.

California Healthline Contributing Editor Dan Diamond provides one of the best analysis out there of why the finding is actually not a bad thing. As new payment systems are deployed and tested, we should expect a great number of them to fail and from each failure, lessons will be learned.

In the case of the patient-centered medical home model, it may be that it has been too broadly applied. Healthy people use little if any health care services and a medical home model that helps them keep on top of needed preventative services would, if anything, increase costs by getting them to use services they otherwise might have forgotten to schedule. Future research on more targeted patient populations (e.g., patients with serious and poorly managed chronic illness) could validate the model.

However, in the meantime, a valuable lesson may have been learned.