Brief and White Paper from AHRQ: Improving PCMH Evidence and Evaluations

Brief and White Paper from AHRQ: Improving PCMH Evidence and Evaluations

AHRQ has produced a decisionmaker brief and white paper that offer suggestions on how to improve the quality of current PCMH evidence and evaluations. 

The decision-maker brief, “Improving Evaluations of the Medical Home,” offers a concise description for decisionmakers of why and how to commission effective evaluations of medical home demonstrations. It provides insights into what outcomes to assess, why to include control practices, and why not accounting for clustering can doom an evaluation.

The white paper, “Building the Evidence Base for the Medical Home: What Sample and Sample Size Do Studies Need?” provides information about how to determine the effect sizes a given study can expect to detect, identifies the number of patients and practices required to detect policy-relevant, achievable effects, and demonstrates how evaluators can select the outcomes and types of patients included in analyses to improve a study’s ability to detect true effects.

Both resources can be found on AHRQ’s PCMH website, http://www.pcmh.ahrq.gov/ or visit: 

• Improving Evaluations of the Medical Home
• Building the Evidence Base for the Medical Home: What Sample and Sample Size Do Studies Need?

Other white papers and decisionmaker briefs available on the website address topics such as care coordination, the medical neighborhood, health IT, and patient engagement. Upcoming resources include a review of the current evidence on the medical home and a “how-to” guide for organizations, which provide practice facilitation support for primary care transformation. Additionally, the website contains a searchable database of approximately 1,000 articles relating to the PCMH that is updated several times a year.
Please share both resources with colleagues, and have them visit http://www.pcmh.ahrq.gov/ for similar products.
Thank you from AHRQ’s Prevention and Chronic Care team.