Blunt details plan for health care homes

Blunt detailed the plan, as well as his plans for next year’s health care budget, at a news conference at the Jordan Valley Community Health Center, 630 W. Kearney St.

The concept of health care homes is one of several recommendations made to Blunt recently by the state’s Social Services, Mental Health, and Health and Senior Services departments as ways to implement Missouri Health Net – a new program for providing health care for low-income people. In 2005, Blunt set a goal of installing such a program by 2008.

Under the recommendation, Missouri’s care providers would be charged with setting up health care homes at their existing practices and offering primary care for Health Net patients. The idea, Blunt says, is to help people create a wellness plan that would prevent them from making trips to the emergency room, thereby cutting overall health care costs.

“A health care home aims to give Health Net participants one central point of contact – a location that holds their medical history, their medications, chronic illnesses and other info relevant to their wellness,” Blunt said. “The health care home works to prevent the situation where one doctor is unaware of the medical treatment that’s being delivered by another doctor.”

Low-income earners would be responsible for enrolling in Health Net on their own, Blunt said, though there will be discussions about providing incentives for joining.

The same goes for physicians, he said; incentives for their participation will be discussed in the near future.

Blunt also spoke about his plans for allocating the $60 million included for health care in his Lewis & Clark Discovery Initiative, which has yet to be validated by the legislature.

If passed, Blunt plans to spend the money on upgrades to or new Federally Qualified Healthcare Centers, with $10 million of that earmarked for Springfield.

Additionally, Blunt said he intends to set aside $750,000 in next fiscal year’s budget for more collaboration between FQHCs and Community Mental Health centers and another $5 million to assist health providers in building electronic-record systems.