What Is a Medical Home?
The Patient Centered Medical Home is an approach to providing comprehensive primary care for children, youth, and adults. Sadly, although this approach is as old as Hippocrates, in this country it is so overshadowed by high tech and high finance that it seems new.
Principles of the Medical Home:
- Personal Physician - each patient has an ongoing relationship with a Dr. Ontai, who is residency trained and rigorously recertified every 6 years to provide expert first contact, continuous, and comprehensive care
- Physician directed medical practice - Dr, Ontai leads his team of professionals in taking clear responsibility for the ongoing care of his patients.
- Whole person orientation - Dr. Ontai provides for all the patient's health care needs or takes responsibility for arranging care with other qualified professionals. This includes care for all stages of life; acute care; chronic care; preventive services, and end of life care
- Care is coordinated and integrated across all elements of the complex health care system (subspecialty care, hospitals, home health agencies, nursing homes) and the patient's community (help form family and public or private community based agencies). Care coordination is enhanced by Dr. Ontai's state of the art electronic medical record system and his ability to speak both English and Spanish fluently.
- Quality and safety are hallmarks of the Ontai Medical Home:
- Dr. Ontai advocates for his patients' achievement of optimal, patient centered outcomes. He designs individulized care plans that flow from compassionate, robust partnerships between him, the patient, and the patient's family
- Dr. Ontai uses evidence based medicine and point of service computerized decision support tools to guide his decision making when appropriate
- Dr. Ontai receives and acts on reports using his computerized patient data. He uses this data to continuously improve patient care, patient education, communication, and objective health outcomes.
- Patients and families participate in quality improvement activities through focus groups and surveys
- Enhanced access to care is available through same day scheduling for urgent needs, telemedicine consultations for distant communities (Turkey, Earth, Hart), and Saturday hours.
