In Home Primary Care
Home Visiting Primary Care Doctors & Nurse Practitioners
One hundred years ago, doctors made house calls and it was the only way to provide medical care to their patients.
Today, many doctors are returning to the practice of making house calls.
Health insurance plans including medicare will now reimburse a doctor and possibly staff member — if test equipment is involved — to visit homebound patients in their homes.
To qualify for a home visit the patient must experience great difficulty in leaving the home in order to meat with the doctor in his or her office. This does not however mean the care recipient need be totally disabled. It simply means that transportation requirements or help needed to get to a doctor might be very expensive or difficult to provide or the patient’s safety might be jeopardized by leaving the home.
Advantages of Using Home Visits
There are also a number of advantages to using home visits as opposed to office visits:
- The patient will be more relaxed and cooperative in familiar surroundings.
- Older people are thrilled that a doctor would take time to visit them in their homes.
- They will be more compliant, more open and as a result receive better treatment as opposed to receiving care in the doctor’s office.
- Typically, the doctor will take more time and be able to establish a better rapport with his patient.
- The idea of the doctor not having to hurry off to another patient in another room is comforting to an older person.
Another very important benefit is that the physician can see the environment in which his or her patient is living and have a better understanding of how that environment may affect his or her patient’s health. By seeing it first-hand, he/she can make recommendations for care that would have been impossible in his office.
In essence the doctor learns much more about a patient in his/her home and he/she can achieve a personal connection that would have been difficult to establish in the office. The ultimate outcome of a house call is that the doctor can provide a greater degree of holistic medicine.
When A Home Visit Is Appropriate
A home visit patient can receive house calls on a periodic or ongoing basis. The patient need not give up other doctors if the reason for being homebound is temporary. Testing equipment in the past few years has become more portable and the doctor can bring an assistant who might provide tests on site. Heart function, lung function and simple blood tests performed on site can give the doctor immediate feedback on the needs of his/her patient and allow him/her to make treatment decisions without the delay of waiting for test results.
The primary providers on this platform are medical doctors, doctors of osteopathy and nurse practitioners.