The NewYork-Presbyterian Regional Health Collaborative: a three-year progress report

The Washington Heights-Inwood section of Manhattan is a predominantly poor Hispanic community with disproportionately high rates of chronic disease, including asthma, diabetes, and congestive heart failure. In October 2010, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, in association with the Columbia University Medical Center, launched an integrated network of patient-centered medical homes that were linked to other providers and community-based resources and formed a "medical village." Three years later, a study of 5,852 patients who had some combination of diabetes, asthma, and congestive heart failure found that emergency department visits and hospitalizations had been reduced by 29.7 percent and 28.5 percent, respectively, compared to the year before implementation of the network. Thirty-day readmissions and average length-of-stay declined by 36.7 percent and 4.9 percent, respectively. Patient satisfaction scores improved across all measures. Financially, NewYork-Presbyterian experienced a short-term return on investment of 11 percent. Some of the gain was a result of increased reimbursements from New York State. Nonetheless, these findings demonstrate that academic medical centers can improve outcomes for poor communities by building regional care models centering on medical homes that incorporate patient-centered processes and are linked through information systems and service collaborations to hospitals, specialty practices, and community-based providers and organizations.