Early PCMH results promising but inconclusive

Is the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model everything it's cracked up to be? It's too soon to know for sure.

That's the conclusion of a report published in the American Journal of Managed Care by research firm Mathematica and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Authors analyzed 498 reports of previous studies and found most of them to be inconclusive, usually because they did not meet rigorous testing standards.

Those that did meet the standards showed some improvement toward the goals of increasing care quality, lowering costs, and improving the overall patient experience, the authors concluded, but they called for additional study.