Medial Home and Family Practice

"Medical home" concept recasts primary-care practices.
NPR (8/26, Rovner) profiled the concept of the "medical home," an idea it says is "spreading around the nation" and involves changes in medical practice that range from where healthcare professionals are located in an office to the use of EMRs to profile patient populations' treatment and compliance on charts and graphs. NPR focused on Martin's Point, Maine, to describe how the "medical home" works. A key concept within the home "is to have everyone 'practicing at the top of their license' or doing what they are most trained to do," says physician Lisa Letourneau, who says another fundamental is "to hand off some of the less specialized -- and often time-consuming -- tasks to others."