Medical Home Reimbursement:
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Each week, healthcare professionals respond to a reader's query on an industry issue. This week's expert is Barbara Wall, president and CEO of Hagen Wall Consulting

Question: What patient education tools provide the greatest ROI in the patient-centered medical home — for instance, disease self-management information, wellness information, information about appropriate ER use, etc.?

Response: As long as the basis of the patient teaching tools is written at a standard grade level, most of them are pretty good. For Medicaid the grade level is usually at about a sixth grade level and for a commercial population the reading grade level is junior high school or about eighth grade level. The most effective use in patient teaching that I have seen is when there is one-to-one contact between the patient educator or DM nurse and the patient. There seems to be a much greater degree of engagement in retention and buy-in by the patient when there is interaction on a one-to-one basis in teaching, rather than the educational material simply being in hard copy accessed by the patient alone.

For more details on patient education in the patient-centered medical home, please visit: http://store.hin.com/product.asp?itemid=3960