Several years ago, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) and the Indian Health Service (IHS) signed a Memorandum of Understanding to develop innovative Home-Based Primary Care (HBPC) pilot projects to service American Indian (AI) veterans who live on rural AI reservations.
The new pilot project started July 2013 under the direction of the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System will examine how partnerships and co-management strategies could reduce geographic and resource barriers in rural areas. Primary research suggests that new models of care are emerging in addition to the traditional HBPC model.
The immediate goal of the proposed project is to document the models and determine their respective patient-level and organizational-level outcomes. A two-phase mixed methods approach is being used.
Phase I will obtain primary data from key respondent telephone interviews and from on-site focus groups supplemented with data abstracted from key program documents. The aim is to identify and characterize variations in HBPC pilot programs and identify key barriers to obtaining clinical collaborations.
Phase II will perform secondary data analyses of the linked and merged VHA and IHS data, along with Medicare administrative databases to document new enrollment utilization patterns and the cost for veterans enrolled in HBPC pilot projects.
Then the program will compare the pilot projects to a usual care sample to examine outcomes associated with the model projects. A panel of experts will provide technical assistance and direction as well as serve as an expert panel to link research findings to recommendations for policy and practice use. Since this is a new study, there are no findings so far to report.
Go to www.hsrd.research.va.gov/research/abstracts.cfm?Project_ID=2141702500 for more information.