Health Care Homes early evidence in Wellington

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Early evidence suggests that a team-based primary healthcare practice model can reduce emergency department admissions to hospitals.

New research conducted by Auckland University of Technology, for the Productivity Commission, looks at the implementation in Wellington of a multi-disciplinary team-based model known as Health Care Homes. That research, entitled Health care homes: Early evidence in Wellington was published today by the Productivity Commission.

The Health Care Home model is described as a “whole of practice transformation”. It involves health professionals working together in new ways and using tools such as an online patient portal and GP telephone triage to tailor services to patients’ needs.

“The main finding of the research is a statistically significant drop in emergency department admissions for patients at practices that implemented the Health Care Homes model,” according to AUT professor of economics Dr Gail Pacheco.

She added that “a drop in ED admissions is not only good for the health sector (in terms of managing costs) it also indicates good outcomes for patients’ health.”

Dr Pacheco noted that “future research would need to focus on the longer-term impacts of the Health Care Homes model, and also include a wider range of practice level data (such as waiting times, staff to patient ratios, use of online services, staff turnover and patient experience data).”

The research was undertaken as part of the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into Measuring and improving state sector productivity, which was completed in August this year.

It uses administrative data on 235,485 enrolled patients from 55 Compass Health Primary Health Organisation general practices, linked with National Minimum Data Set records from Capital and Coast DHB. Of the 55 general practices, 11 implemented the Health Care Homes change process between July 2016 and October 2017. This means they operated the new model for three to 15 months during the period of the study (which used data from 2014–2017).

Productivity Commission inquiry director Judy Kavanagh says “the health sector is facing unprecedented cost and demand pressures, including from new health treatments and an ageing population. Primary healthcare is an important lever to address these pressures, because of its role in prevention and early intervention and in better coordination of other health services.”

She added that “it has always been thought of as too difficult to measure the impact and productivity of primary healthcare services. This research shows that innovation in general practice services can reduce patients’ use of hospital services, and that it is possible to measure these impacts using linked data”.

Source: Productivity Commission media release, 4 October 2018

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