By ANN CARRNS

You may have heard the term “medical home” to describe a way of organizing doctors’ practices to provide more comprehensive, less costly, patient-friendly treatment. Insurance companies often offer more money to practices that become recognized as medical homes, which use a team approach to coordinate care. States are even looking to medical homes to help save money in their Medicaid programs.

Now, a study of one large, long-running pilot of the medical home approach has found that it resulted in limited quality improvement, and that it didn’t save money, over a three-year period.

The report, by researchers at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research group, appears in the Feb. 26 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association. The study evaluated the Southeastern Pennsylvania Chronic Care Initiative, one of the nation’s earliest and largest medical home pilots. The Commonwealth Fund and Aetna Inc. provided funding for the study.

Continue reading here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/26/your-money/study-finds-limited-benefit-to-some-medical-homes.html?_r=1