Medical Versus Health Homes for Patients

Abstract

It has long been a tenet of medical care that people should have personal “medical homes,” sources of continuous primary care that they use regularly and consistently. This has been touted as ideally a primary physician practice, whereby continuity of an individual physician would be added to consistent use and the personal physician would be familiar with the patient over years of contacts. But it could also be a clinic, prepaid group practice, or similar arrangement in which continuity is based as much on shared medical records as on individual memory, which, after all, is rarely reliable or complete.