Bill Corr, deputy health secretary: Scaling up health care innovations ‘will take time’

By Chelsea Conaboy, Globe Staff

Neponset Health Center opened a pharmacy in its lobby about a year ago. It has a staff of social workers who connect patients, as needed, to an in-house food pantry, substance abuse services, and even kids’ furniture. And the center, considered a patient-centered medical home, has integrated primary care and behavioral health services.

Bill Corr, deputy secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, visited the Dorchester center this week to see a model of some of the programs that the Affordable Care Act is aimed at implementing nationwide.

“It’s so valuable to get out of Washington to see the actual programs,” he said. “We need to pilot these things. We’re being very thorough in evaluating them, ensuring that they meet important quality measures and then spread[ing] the information about how to do a better job.”

But how do you take the successes in single communities or individual health centers and replicate them nationally? The challenge of scale cuts across industries. I was talking with a friend who is an education advocate last weekend about how leaders in his field know what works in the classroom. The difficulty lies in making the same techniques work in many classrooms.

I put the question to Corr.

“One step at time,” he said.

He said medical training is changing and industry leaders are focusing more and more on how improving quality will lower health care costs.

“It will take time,” he said. “It starts with ample (health insurance) coverage for everyone, as Massachusetts has now. That enables providers to take care of people where they need to be taken care of.”