Instructions for the Pediatric and Adult Primary Care Medical Home

Medical Home Index - Short Version

The Medical Home Index – Short Version (MHI-SV) represents ten indicators which have been derived CMHI’s original Medical Home Index-Full Version (MHI-FV). This short version can be used as an interval measurement in conjunction with the original MHI or it can be used as a quick “report card” or snapshot of practice quality. CMHI recommends the use of the MHI-FV for practice improvement purposes but offers this short version for interval or periodic measurement and/or when it is not feasible to use the MHI-FV.

The Medical Home Index is a nationally validated self-assessment tool designed to quantify the “medical homeness” of a primary care practice. The MHI contains twenty-five indicators which detail excellent, pro-active, comprehensive pediatric primary care. It functions both as a quality improvement tool and as a self education medium relevant to the medical home.

The Medical Home Index: Short Version (MHI-SV) is a brief representation of the more complete measurement tool and available in both Pediatric and Adult Primary Care versions. It scores a practice on a continuum of care across three levels:

  • Level 1 is good, responsive pediatric/adult primary care.
  • Level 2 is pro-active pediatric/adult primary care (in addition to Level 1)
  • Level 3 illustrates pediatric/adult primary care at the most comprehensive levels (it is in addition to Levels 1 and 2).

As the reporter for your entire practice and in response to each of the ten indicators - please score your medical home at: Level 1, Level 2 “partial”, Level 2 “complete”, Level 3 “partial”, or Level 3 “complete”.

Click to link to:

Guidelines

When using the MHI tools we request that you:

  1. Inform CMHI in writing (CMHI@crotchedmountain.org) of your intent.
  2. Make every effort to gain family feedback with our tool or one of your choosing. We believe that “medical homeness” cannot be fully measured without an analysis of the family perspective.
  3. Consider sharing your practice and family data with us (confidential, de-identified) in order to benchmark. Please remove all practice and personal identifiers.

Instructions to Complete

First: Determine whether your practice primarily cares for pediatric or adult patients and select either the Pediatric or Adult Medical Home Index. Practices with separate provider teams and processes may want to consider completing the MHI for each team.

Second: Read each theme across its progressive continuum from Level 1 to Level 3.

Third: Score your medical home at: Level 1, Level 2 “partial”, Level 2 “complete”, Level 3 “partial”, or Level 3 “complete” which best describes how your practice currently provides care.

How to Measure the MHI –FV

To measure medical home baseline and improvements, we have created a “MHI-SV Scoring Template” Excel spreadsheet to easily score and track practice MHI results.

Follow these steps to enter data into the “MHI-SV Scoring Template” excel spreadsheet.

  1. Complete the Adult/Pediatric Medical Home Index- Short Version and have available to enter results into the Excel “MHI-SV Scoring Template”.
  2. For each level selected in the MHI, a point system is applied to score the MHI. See Table 2 below.

    Table 2

    LevelPartialCompleteMedical Homeness
    11 pointGood, responsive care
    22 points3 pointsProactive
    34 points5 pointsComprehensive

    Example: MHI-SV #1 Family Feedback if “Level 2: Complete” selected, score is 3 points.

  3. Open Excel file “MHI-SV Scoring Template”.
  4. Open tab for either Adult or Pediatric per the completed MHI-SV. {Note: scoring templates are the same for Adult and Pediatric}
  5. Each column starting from left to right applies to responses in the MHI. {Note: the first three far left columns “A, B, and C” can be used to differentiate multiple MHI entries per date. Use a separate row for each entry.}
  6. Next starting with column “D” refers to an indicator in the MHI. {See tab “Column Description” for abbreviation explanation}.

    Example: oc1.5 refers to Organizational Capacity 1.5 (MHI-FV) Family Feedback

  7. Enter the Level score into each column (refer to Table 2 for scoring).
  8. At the end of each entry, the “MHI-SV Scoring Template” will auto calculate the sum (total points scored), Column N: “mhis_raw”.
  9. The “MHI-SV Scoring Template” will auto calculate a standard deviation score, Column M: “mhis_std”.
  10. The higher the score, the higher the Level of reported medical “homeness”.