How can a health plan fund the transition to a more chronic care medical home model?
Response: (Dr. George Rust, family practice physician for Physicians in Practice, head of the National Center for Primary Care at Morehouse School of Medicine) There are lots of different options. Capitate payments can sometimes offer the opportunity to have a more multidisciplinary team involved in care. If youre in a purely fee-for-service (FFS) environment, broaden your teams so that nurse practitioners (NP), mental health professionals and behavioral healthcare specialists are all part of the team. In our state, we found that many of our community health centers believed that they could not have two visits by different providers billed on the same day out of the same facility. For example, they could not co-locate psychologists and primary care clinicians in the building on the same day. That turned out to not be true. Those types of visits would indeed be paid for. Therefore, the first step would be determining how to broaden the team so that it isnt just a doctor-centered model,
