Paper: Can Home‐Based Primary Care Drive Integration of Medical and Social Care for Older Adults?
The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS) has published an editorial, "Can Home‐Based Primary Care Drive Integration of Medical and Social Care for Complex Older Adults?"
Drs. Bruce Leff, Andrew Lasher, and Christine S. Ritchie comment on "Integrated Home‐ and Community‐Based Services Improve Community Survival Among Independence at Home Medicare Beneficiaries Without Increasing Medicaid Costs." That paper by Girish Valluru et al evaluated outcomes associated with integrating medical and social care for enrollees in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) Independence at Home (IAH) demonstration. Valluru concluded that, "HBPC [home-based primary care] integrated with long-term support services delays LTI [longterm institutionalization] in frail, medically complex Medicare beneficiaries without increasing HCBS costs."
As Dr. Leff's editorial notes, 'IAH has been one of CMMI's most successful demonstration projects; high‐quality care has been delivered to a complex population, with first‐year savings 10 times as great as those of pioneer accountable care organizations (ACOs), with projections for billions in savings were the program to be scaled nationally."
Drs. Leff and Ritchie are John A. Hartford Foundation grantees.
To read the editorial, click here.
To read the paper, click here.