A health home — as defined in Section 2703 of the Affordable Care Act — offers coordinated care to individuals with multiple chronic health conditions, including mental health and substance use disorders. The health home is a team-based clinical approach that includes the consumer, his or her providers, and family members, when appropriate.
The health home builds linkages to community supports and resources as well as enhances coordination and integration of primary and behavioral healthcare to better meet the needs of people with multiple chronic illnesses. This approach centralizes care management and supports individuals as they work toward self-management goals. The model aims to improve healthcare quality while also reducing costs.
Care management is central to the recent shift away from focus on episodic acute care to focus on health management of defined populations, especially those living with chronic health conditions. This shift in focus results from lessons learned from primary and behavioral healthcare integration efforts, as health homes recognize the importance of caring for the whole person. Such a shift would necessitate integrating primary and behavioral healthcare and, as seen in the IMPACT model, explicitly building care manager/behavioral health consultant and consulting psychiatrist functions into the medical home model.
- An updated health homes page features the new report, Financing and Policy Considerations for Behavioral Health Homes, along with an overview of the key highlights of the paper and a new health home fact sheet. The page also includes links to other health home resources, including recordings from webinars on the topic.