What is a medical home?
In short a medical home is a family-centered model that delivers integrated primary care services and builds better relationships between patients, families and their clinical care teams. The medical home is intended to result in more personalized, coordinated, effective and efficient care.
“The medical home has become a widely accepted model for how primary care should be organized and delivered throughout the health care system, and is a philosophy of health care delivery that encourages providers and care teams to meet patients where they are, from the most simple to the most complex conditions. It is a place where patients are treated with respect, dignity, and compassion, and enables strong and trusting relationships with providers and staff. Above all, the medical home is not a final destination. Instead, it is a model for achieving primary care excellence so that care is received in the right place, at the right time, and in the manner that best suits a patient's needs.” https://www.pcpcc.org/about/medical-home
The term “medical home” was first used by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in 1967 to describe a single centralized source of care and medical record for children with special health care needs. It laid the groundwork for AAP’s policy statement in 1992 that defined a medical home as delivering family-centered, comprehensive, continuous and coordinated care that all infants and children deserve. The current concept of patient-centered medical home (PCMH) has been expanded in the last 40 years to redesign primary care and provide the highest quality of care possible.