Roger Merrill, MD, chief medical officer of Perdue Foods Inc. of Salisbury, Md., told students at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy yesterday that they should be concerned about future health care costs.
He's worried "because health care is what is putting the United States out of business on the world stage."
In delivering the Francis S. Balassone Memorial Lecture on Nov. 2, Merrill offered a Perdue perspective on the long-discussed model of "medical home" centers of care for companies and other institutions, as part of the ongoing health care reform debate.
"Medical home" is a term for a model in which patients can receive care from a primary care doctor and other medical professionals in one place, "but how it will work [in each situation] will still be discussed for a number of years to come," explained Natalie D. Eddington, PhD, dean of the School of Pharmacy.
Perdue has implemented such a model in each of its wellness programs, serving about 22,000 employees, Merrill said. But, he acknowledged, Perdue has not yet added pharmacists to the centers.
Merrill said one reason he looked forward to visiting the School of Pharmacy was to seek advice from Eddington and her faculty for adding pharmacists to each of Perdue's wellness programs.
"If you've seen one medical home, you've seen one," explained Merrill, "each case will be different."
The history of the medical home model, he said, was fueled in recent years by a number of special interests championing the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC)--a Medicare-Medicaid Advanced Primary Care Demonstration Initiative.
Six of seven advantages to the model are an ongoing relationship with a personal physician, doctor-directed practice, whole person-oriented medicine (not organ-based medicine), coordinated care across the medical system, assured quality and safety, and enhanced access. "The United States health care system mostly fails to deliver No. 7," he said, "payment-recognized value-added services, or value of health care based on outcomes."