Lessons From the Community-Centered Health Home Demonstration Project

Only recently has the United States' health care system made population health and health promotion a priority. This historic shift in the system is in response to incentives within the Affordable Care Act to meet its triple aim: improving quality of care and patient satisfaction, improving the health of populations, and reducing the per capita cost of health care. While local and state health partnership models are being tested, and large health care organizations are embracing a “health in all policies” approach, which emphasizes multisector collaboration to improve population health, there are still no concrete strategies for how primary care clinics, and safety-net clinics in particular, can participate in this larger effort.

In light of this, Daphne Miller, MD, Senior Advisor, Prevention Institute; and LPHI's Eric T. Baumgartner, MD, MPH, Senior Community Health Strategist; wrote an essay describing the experience of five safety-net clinics in four Gulf Coast states in creating a Community-Centered Health Home (CCHH) by building on the three established characteristics of a successful Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH). The CCHH model provides a framework for primary care – and health care organizations in general – to address individual health needs while systematically addressing community conditions that affect individual health. 

The essay was published by the CDC's Preventing Chronic Disease (PCD) journal in August 2016. Click here to read the full piece.