Family Health Initiative: Opportunities and challenges

  • Published
  • By Lt. Col. Gregory Cullison
  • 436th Medical Support Squadron
DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. --  If you have been in the 436th Medical Group in the last few months, you have noticed quite a bit of change. The Pharmacy, Optometry Clinic, Diagnostic Imaging, and the TRICARE Service Center have all changed locations. Joining them on the first floor in June will be the Family Health, Pediatrics, Women's Health and Immunizations Clinics. We are looking forward to the new and improved appearance of the facility, and we hope you are too.

Not only will these changes create a more aesthetically pleasing environment, there will also be a carefully designed functional realignment of medical group services. The goal of the redesign is to place most of our patient care clinics and services on the ground floor so they are easily and efficiently accessible to our patients and their families. Patient flow will be enhanced by aligning clinical services with pharmacy, laboratory, and radiology so that patients and staff will have to do much less running around the building. In addition, the clinics have been redesigned to better accommodate the staff in accordance with the innovation known as Family Health Initiative.

The Air Force launched the FHI in 2008 at two bases, and it will be up and running at all Air Force bases by 2012. For us at Dover AFB, we will begin FHI this summer. This week, there was a team of experts here to conduct training and preparatory work to ensure we are ready to implement the initiative. The training went very well, and our team is up to the challenge to ensure our patients receive the best care we can deliver.

The FHI is the Air Force Medical Service's version of a larger national healthcare model known as Patient Centered Medical Home. A medical home is a team-based care model led by a personal physician (provider) that provides continuous, coordinated care, ideally over the long term, to maximize health outcomes. That is a fancy way to state the goal of providing a high degree of communication between a patient and a defined healthcare team, what we call a Primary Care Manager team. Our PCM teams have been redesigned to include a physician as team leader, supported by a physician assistant or nurse practitioner, a nurse, and five medical technicians. Each of our patients will be enrolled to a team, and patients should get all of their primary care services from that team.

There are a few things you should be aware of if you receive care in the medical group at Dover AFB. We are in the process of realigning our PCM teams, so many of our beneficiaries will soon be mailed PCM change letters from Health Net. When you call for an appointment, we will attempt to get you an appointment with your PCM team. One of the most important tenets of FHI is "continuity of care." Beginning in July, your appointment should be with one of the two providers on your FHI team, and you should not have an appointment made with a different team. This helps to make the care process more efficient for patients and providers so that the communication, rapport, and trust can be built, and eliminates much of the redundancy and reduces the potential for medical errors created by seeing a host of different doctors for your care.

We will be experiencing significant personnel shortages in the Family Health Clinic this summer due to deployments and PCS moves, so it will be very difficult to ensure patients are only seen by their assigned FHI team. But we will do the best we can, and we ask for our patients' understanding as we launch the new initiative in the midst of tough times on the manning front.

Through the FHI, we are looking forward to providing improved access to the highest quality of patient-centered care we possibly can. Please come over to see the new medical group facilities and let us know what you think. As we implement FHI, we really need your feedback to ensure we are getting it right from the patient perspective. Watch The Airlifter for notices of our quarterly Healthcare Consumer Advisory Council meetings, which is a forum for communication between the medical group and its customers. Everyone is welcome to attend and participate; the next meeting is in June. Feedback forms are available throughout the facility, and we pay attention to every one of the forms we receive. You are always invited to speak with any of our patient advocates to provide feedback on how we are doing. We value your opinions greatly.