The American Academy of Family Physicians along with a coalition of large employers, consumer groups, patient quality organizations, health plans, hospitals and others have joined together to develop and advance a new medical model – the patient-centered medical home. This model is an approach to providing comprehensive primary care, while enhancing care coordination to ensure better health outcomes, higher patient experience and more efficient use of resources.
Under the medical home model patients are cared for by a personal physician who leads a team approach to coordinate all aspects of preventive, acute, and chronic needs of patients using the best available evidence and appropriate technology. The medical home would help the patient navigate the byzantine health care system and coordinate all aspects of the patients' care.
The key to making the patient-centered medical home model a reality is restructuring primary care reimbursement to compensate primary care physicians for coordinating and managing the patient's health care and providing the physicians the health information tools they need.
Read much more at the AAFP website:
http://www.aafp.org/online/en/home/membership/initiatives/pcmh.html
And at the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative website:
http://www.PCPCC.net