The Care Model for Child Health in a Medical Home highlights the desired outcomes of a strong medical home: family-centered, timely, efficient, evidenced-based, safe and coordinated care offered by a prepared, proactive, practice team in partnership with an informed, activated, patient and family, in the context of a supportive, integrated, community. While this is a tall order, making changes in the six arenas will enable practices working to improve their medical home to build their system and offer this kind of care

Improvement Ideas

The change package for Medical Home, based on the Care Model for Child Health in a Medical Home, outlines features of the ideal system for medical home and a set of evidence-based strategies proven to be effective in achieving improvements (“change concepts”). The ability to develop, test, and implement changes is essential for any practice that wants to improve. After selecting specific changes, practices should run Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles to test a change or group of changes on a small scale to see if they result in improvement. If they do, practices may expand the tests and gradually incorporate larger samples until they are confident that the changes can be adopted more widely across the practice.