CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – Jeff Giannetto suffers from several chronic health problems. He’s had four heart attacks in his lifetime, and has COPD, a condition that’s put him in the hospital.
“They admitted me a lot of times for flare-up,” Giannetto explained. “They call it pneumonia. In March, I was in there three times with it,” he told us, referring to the emergency room.
The problem is that Giannetto was waiting until those flare-ups to seek care. But since he started participating in the medical home program at MercyCare Community Physicians, Giannetto has noticed major improvements in the quality of care he’s received and his own health. He now meets regularly with Dr. Brad Archer, executive medical director, who works with a team of specialists to keep patients like Giannetto out of the emergency room.
That’s the primary objective of a medical home.
“It really allows us a multidisciplinary approach so we can affect all of the patient’s needs in the clinic, and not just their immediate and obvious medical needs,” Dr. Archer explained.
Dr. Archer said with medical home status, which MercyCare Community Physicians was awarded last year, there’s a greater emphasis on preventing trips to the hospital, instead of waiting for them to happen and then administering care afterward.
“It gives us an opportunity to try to anticipate those, and intervene beforehand, so that gives them an alternative, rather than having to get so sick that they need to utilize those services.”
But in order to achieve medical home status, clinics have more than 100 different requirements they have to meet. UnityPoint Health is on the road to certification, according to Dr. Clayton Schuett.
“We have to have an electronic health record, we have to have a patient portal as a way of communication with patients for both their standpoint and our standpoint,” Dr. Schuett said, adding that clinics also need to review a patient’s information before they arrive for an appointment.
That means UnityPoint clinics like the one in Mt. Vernon are changing their floor layouts to encourage more face-to-face contact – or “huddles” as they’re called – between every person working there.
“So we have all of our team members, our front office staff who check patients in, check patients out, our nurses and our providers, all sitting in the same location, to try and improve communication,” Schuett said.
The model of a single primary care physician taking on a patient’s needs, according to Schuett, is becoming outdated.
“A lot of times, medicine has been based on the physician and what they’ve been wanting for health care. As we move toward medical home, we’re trying to have much more patient-centered, building a team of health care professionals around them.”
UnityPoint’s 16 clinics in the Cedar Rapids area should achieve medical home recognition within the next 2 years.
As for patients like Giannetto, he’s reaping the benefits of this program now. His doctor, psychiatrist, and social worker are working together to keep him healthy.
“Dr. Archer will call me up and say, ‘hey Jeff, how are you doing today?'” said Giannetto, remarking on how uncommon it is in his experience, to get care that personalized.
Giannetto said his out-of-pocket and insurance costs haven’t changed much, but his outlook on his personal health has. “I feel like [Dr. Archer] cares for me. I feel like he gives me the care that I need.”
University of Iowa Hospitals and clinics is currently practicing the same approach. UnityPoint’s Mt. Vernon clinic hopes to know within the next month or so, if it’s been awarded medical home status.