Dive Brief:
- A Department of Health and Human Services experiment to provide more efficient care to high-risk Medicare patients at federally funded health centers failed to hit its goals.
- According to a government report, the program will likely not save money in the long run.
- The experiment, which came at a price tag of $57 million, was run by the DHHS innovation center.
Dive Insight:
One of the program's goals was to create medical homes for high-risk patients. At the end of the trial period, only 69% of clinics that hadn't dropped out had met that goal; DHHS had been hoping for 90%.
A second goal of the project was to reduce unnecessary hospital visits. Instead, hospital admissions and emergency room visits for patients at participating centers were higher when compared to those that were't part of the project. Expenses at participating centers were also higher.
"It appears that the demonstration will not achieve cost savings," the RAND Corp., an independent research group commissioned by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in its report.
Health-reform specialists told NPR that the results of this experiment shouldn't be considered a strike against medical homes. "It would be a mistake to say we can conclude that the medical home model does not work," said Dr. Marshall Chin, a professor at the University of Chicago medical school.
In fact, the experiment took so long to get off the ground that the medical home model was barely even tested. Most of the centers that did end up qualitying as medical homes didn't become certified until late in the program.