Dive Brief:
- Though patient-centered medical homes (PCMHs) can reduce mortality rates and improve outcomes in high risk diabetes patients, the PCMHs can do better if they take care managers on board as well, according to a new study by the Joslin Diabetes Center.
- The research team compared how groups of nurses, nurse practitioners, social workers and medical assistants performed acting as care managers. Joslin studied the effects in three different practices in southern Pennsylvania with 25 primary care PCMHs.
- The team found practices that demonstrated the most improvement in diabetic health were those where medical professionals did more patient centered care manager duties. Researchers also found that PCMHs did better when they had an EMR in place for messaging and patient tracking.
Dive Insight:
The results of this study are well worth digesting. A practice can call itself a PCMH, but without tools like EMRs to track care maintenance, and embedded nurse care managers dedicated to focusing on patients at the highest risk, it's not much of a surprise that they don't do as well. It's also not surprising that practices that spent more time administration and less on patient care didn't achieve the kind of results those did that invested in care managers and EMRs. In other words, it seems pretty clear what PCPs have to do to get the results a PCMH should. Now will they -- or can they -- actually do it?