This year’s Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC) Annual Review of the Evidence summarizes new results from primary care patient-centered medical home (PCMH) initiatives published from September 2013 through November 2014 (since the publication of the previous Annual Review). Selected cost and utilization outcomes from a combination of peer-reviewed studies, state program evaluations, and industry publications are aggregated to present an overview of PCMH and primary care innovations happening across the country.
The evidence for the PCMH described here underscores the impressive and growing trends that tie the medical home model of care with reductions in health care costs and unnecessary utilization of services; improvements in population health and preventive services; increased access to primary care; and growing satisfaction among patients and clinicians. This is positive news for stakeholders of the PCMH and primary care and runs counter to one widely publicized study of an early PCMH pilot, which found no cost or utilization reductions (included and analyzed in this report). The call for increasing collaboration across the medical neighborhood and into communities where patients and consumers live and work is also growing, as described by our guest authors in Section 3 (page 29).