Table 2.
A Brief History of the Patient-Centered Medical Home
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1967 | The AAP introduces the medical home concept to coordinate care for children with multiple needs (expanded model with 13 elements was introduced in 2002)19–22 |
| 1992 | Barbara Starfield summarizes the evidence for the essential attributes of primary care for a high-functioning health care system23 (updated in 199824 and 200525) |
| 1996 | The Institute of Medicine “advocates development and sustained support of means to make primary care available to all Americans,”26(p1) and notes: “First, primary care is the logical basis of an effective health care system. Second, primary care is essential to reaching the objectives that constitute value in health care”26(p52) |
| 2001 | The Institute of Medicine Crossing the Quality Chasm report calls for transforming a “fundamentally flawed” US health care system27 |
| 2004 | In the Future of Family Medicine Project, 7 family medicine organizations propose a “New Model” of care, the “personal medical home”28,29 |
| 2005 | TransforMED is created as a subsidiary of the AAFP to test the “New Model.” (The model evolves to encompass PCMH features,30 but includes no payment reform— a key tenet of the PCMH) |
| 2005 | The Commonwealth Fund proposes a “2020 vision of patient-centered care”31 (and later begins funding pilot programs) |
| 2006 | The ACP proposes the advanced medical home, which includes principal care as well as primary care32 |
| 2006 | Medical home demonstration projects within Medicare are called for in the Tax Relief and Health Care Act, to be implemented by 2010.33 |
| 2006 | The NDP is launched34 |
| 2007 | Four organizations (AAFP, AAP, ACP, AOA) jointly issue a statement on the PCMH in February35 |
| 2007 | The Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative is launched in March36 |
| 2007 | The NCQA launches a tool—Physician Practice Connections–Patient-Centered Medical Home (PPC-PCMH)—which preemptively become the de facto standard for recognition as a PCMH37 |
| 2008 | WHO declares 2008 the year of primary health care38,39 |
| 2009 | Multiple pilot projects are in process and early findings begin to be published1,40–42 |
| 2009 | Incorporation of the PCMH in federal and state reform legislation increases, and the number of demonstration projects and individual practice and system efforts grows |
AAP = American Academy of Pediatrics; AAFP = American Academy of Family Physicians; ACP = American College of Physicians; AOA = American Osteopathic Association; NCQA = National Committee on Quality Assurance; NDP = National Demonstration Project; PCMH = patient-centered medical home; WHO = World Health Organization.