Dive Brief:

• Many Medicaid programs throughout the country are creating new or expanding existing home health projects to help cut costs and prevent so-called super utilizers from obtaining unnecessary healthcare services.
• Super-utilizers are patients with complex, chronic medical problems, who disproportionately use expensive healthcare services, especially emergency room visits and hospital admissions. Just 5% of the 68 million Medicaid beneficiaries make up 60% of the program's overall spending, according to reports.
• At least 15 state Medicaid programs are paying for doctors to specifically address these patients. The states—Alabama, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin—are establishing "health homes," where doctors coordinate physical and mental care for these patients.

Dive Insight:

Care coordination holds a lot of promise for helping to reduce the cost of super utilizers. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, which reimburses healthcare providers who coordinate care for patients with more than one chronic condition, there is now more support for technology and policies that assist with these efforts. 

Missouri was the first state to create a health home in 2012 and has about 20,000 people with severe mental illness enrolled in its homes, FierceHealthPayer noted. After operating for just one year, Missouri's health-home program saved almost $3 million by preventing unnecessary hospital admissions and emergency room visits.