An Iowa hospital is in the national spotlight this afternoon in an Associated Press story focusing on “medical homes.”

The story focuses on Dr. Don Klitgaard and his colleagues at Myrtue Medical Center in Harlan and their use of the medical home model, which focuses on primary care and coordinating the care of patients at that level:

Put primary care doctors like Klitgaard on the front end, the theory goes, and they could make sure patients see the right specialists, avoid duplicative tests, get proper medications and prevent the worst complications of chronic illness, such as diabetes-related blindness.

The problem is, health care payment systems, including Medicare and Medicaid, don’t line up with the Medical home model:

Klitgaard is wondering if Congress will do enough for primary care doctors, the ones expected to carry out the transformation. Medicare, the government health program for seniors, doesn’t pay for the care coordination, monitoring, and coaching of patients that are part of his model.

The practice model at Myrtue is nothing new, at least in Iowa.  It is one of the reasons why Iowa spends far less on Medicare patients than nearly all other states, yet retains extremely high quality of care, as the Commonwealth Fund noted in its most recent report.

Unfortunately, while Iowa’s practice model limits wasteful tests and visits to multiple specialists, keeps patients out of hospitals and ICUs and promotes hospice care, the model in other hospitals in many other states tends to do quite the opposite.  The result forces Iowa to effectively subsidize the wasteful ways of those hospitals.

The good news is stories like this one, which notes that the medical home model is getting more and more attention from Congress and the White House.

The other good news is that Iowa hospitals and practitioners are ready to show the world how and why the medical home model works.  On-point in that effort is the Iowa Healthcare Collaborative, the organization founded by IHA and the Iowa Medical Society to advance health care quality in Iowa and beyond.  IHC has developed a comprehensive medical home model toolkit.

And Dr. Klitgaard?  He happens to be the co-chair of IHC’s medical home model workgroup.