New Orleans creates medical home for poor residents

Some new changes to the New Orleans health system have given some residents something that would have been good even without the nightmare of Katrina. The city's charity care system is trying to get patients to use specific public health clinics as "medical homes" that can monitor their primary care, psychiatric care and specialist referrals. The clinics are also the beneficiary of a series of grants, including a $400,000 grant from Avon for a digital mammography machine and $100,000 from the Association of Black Cardiologists. The clinics are linked by an EMR system which gives the medical home system more strength--after all, what good is a medical home if the primary physician doesn't know what's going on when patients are elsewhere?

The project is expected not only to improve post-Katrina care for the poor, but also reduce an ethnic gap in care wherein the city's largely African-American minorities weren't getting the same care as their white counterparts.

To learn more about the project:
- read this USA Today article

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