Missouri Blue plan kicks off medical home pilot

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, Mo., has partnered with a subsidiary of the American Academy of Family Physicians to launch a medical home pilot.

The Blue plan is rolling out the pilot to 13 primary-care groups around the Kansas City metro. To help make the project a success, it's working with the AAFP's TransforMED. TransforMED offers "practice enhancement facilitators" tasked with helping physician practices make a success of this approach, offering guidance on adding technologies, increasing patient and doctor satisfaction and reducing errors.

Under the terms of the pilot, each patient will get a personal physician whose job is to coordinate most of the patient's care, and manage the patient's care across sub-specialties, hospitals, nursing homes and health agencies. The idea is to manage this process using electronic medical records, which can help practices track chronic diseases among patients, set up reminders for key services and more.

BCBS of Kansas City is financially supporting the project. The plan hopes to figure out how it should reimburse primary-care docs who deliver high-quality care efficiently and keep patients happy. It's also going to look at how to offer patients useful incentives to take better care of themselves and comply with physician instructions.

To learn more about the pilot:
- read this press release

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Case study: NY pilot changes how 'medical home' is reimbursed

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