Center for Health Care Strategies, Inc.

The Affordable Care Act provides states with a new option to provide intensive coordinated services through health homes for Medicaid populations with multiple chronic conditions.

A health home is a network of providers across a community, with the lead provider facilitating access to an array of medical, behavioral health, and social services. Seven states, including New York, have received approval from the Federal government for their health home programs, and approximately half of all states have some degree of health home planning or implementation underway. With NYHealth funding, the Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS) built upon a previous learning collaborative to create and strengthen the Health Homes Learning Collaborative—a forum for health homes to share their early implementation successes and challenges, engage in peer-to-peer learning, identify best practices, and guide future policymaking.

Under this grant, CHCS facilitated a total of six in-person meetings. These meetings included interactive group discussions and presentations by relevant experts. To encourage ongoing interaction and idea sharing among participating providers between in-person meetings, CHCS created an online community for use exclusively by the Health Homes Learning Collaborative. Based on discussions at the in-person meetings and from online community postings, CHCS identified opportunities to hold small group working sessions via conference call in between the larger meetings. To highlight and disseminate the key findings from the learning collaborative, CHCS prepared an issue brief summarizing the lessons learned from New York’s implementation of the health home model. At the end of the project, CHCS hosted a national webinar to mark the release of the issue brief.

Read the CHCS brief, “Seizing the Opportunity: Early Medicaid Health Home Lessons,” and fact sheet, “Medicaid Health Homes: Implementation Update,” associated with this grant. View an infograhic, “Medicaid Health Homes: State Update,” that summarizes key points in establishing Medicaid health homes.