"Patient Centered Medical Home" makes it into NEJM

In May I posted some slides from PCPCC, the Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative, which has been working for years to promote the value of having a "medical home," a place where doctors and staff know you. We grew up with a family doctor, but PCPCC says 40% of Americans no longer have a medical home; increasingly we're handled just by specialists, and so many of us only get care by going to emergency rooms.

The "medical home" is not a concept that's widely acknowledged in America as something we should strive for. Even though most of the industrialized nations in the world have it, and even though their costs are better, and even though their health is better, we don't have it as a common concept in our healthcare conversations.

I'm very, very pleased to say that today's New England Journal of Medicine has an important column about this concept.

How ironic that it's described as a "new model of care delivery." Look at the slides in that PCPCC post, with all the data they have from every other modern country in the world - this is a new idea?

Perhaps it's American arrogance, thinking "Well, if we didn't think of it, it's new." (In business, that thinking is a good way to go out of business, as the American auto industry has been doing for decades.) I don't know. I'm just heartened to see a major journal like NEJM finally recognizing this information.