"Welcome to our company blog. Within these blog posts, we hope to share our insights on clinical quality management, the patient-centered medical home, chronic disease management in primary care, evidence-based medicine, and the use of technology in ambulatory care settings."

- David Morin, CEO and Donald Nease Jr., MD, Chief Medical Officer

I haven't seen this covered in any of the daily health care newsletters I receive, but I certainly think it warrants great attention.

"Initial Lessons From the First National Demonstration Project on Practice Transformation to a Patient-Centered Medical Home" is a paper published in the May/June 2009 edition of the Annals of Family Medicine. In it, the authors summarize the findings of the American Academy of Family Physicians' National Demonstration Project where a model of the patient-centered medical home was tested in 36 family practices across the US.

For anyone working toward or contemplating a Medical Home model, you really need to pay attention to the outlined Initial Lessons Learned and Practice Recommendations.

In summary, it shows that moving to a medical home is not easy, in fact, it's really hard to do. And it takes a huge commitment.

Regarding technology, there's a great quote in the paper "For example, it is possible and sometimes preferable to implement e-prescribing, local hospital system connections, evidence at the point-of-care, disease registries and interactive patient Web portals without an EMR." 1

In other words, Cielo Clinic with e-prescribing may be what you need for a medical home.

Cielo is a big proponent of the medical home model and our software supports what it requires. But, I also believe that the items in this paper regarding the transformation process are what's most important to consider if you are taking this journey.

I urge you to read this paper, it's in the Annals of Family Medicine, Vol 7, No 3, May/June 2009.

1 Annals of Family Medicine 7:254-260 (2009)


Dave Morin
CEO and Co-Founder
Cielo MedSolutions LLC