Health centers use teamwork in patient care

State officials recently announced that Massachusetts will receive $500,000 in grant money to support the transformation of 14 community health centers into “patient-centered medical homes.’’ Among the centers selected for the program are the Greater Lawrence Family Health Center and the Cambridge Health Alliance’s Revere Family Health Center.

The patient-centered medical home is an approach to providing patient care that is attracting growing interest and support around the country.

Under the model, a primary-care physician leads a team of medical practitioners who coordinate all of a patient’s needs, including managing chronic conditions, arranging visits to specialists, and hospital admissions. The intent is to improve the quality of care and in so doing reduce long-term costs.

“We are certainly pleased to be asked to participate in this pilot. We’ve been moving in this direction for a long time,’’ said Robert Ingala, chief executive officer of the Greater Lawrence Family Health Center.

Ingala said that one of the underpinnings of the model is to create a comprehensive electronic medical record for each patient, something his center has done for the past 10 years.

“That’s really helped us to coordinate care for our patients,’’ and in particular to monitor the condition of patients with such chronic illnesses as diabetes, asthma, and hypertension, said Ingala, whose 29-year-old center provides primary care and other health services to about 44,000 residents in the Merrimack Valley.

The grant money is being provided through a Safety Net Medical Home Initiative led by the Commonwealth Fund of New York and implemented by Qualis Health, a Seattle-based health improvement organization. Each region also has co-funders.

The Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services and the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers were selected to serve as one of five national regional coordinating centers. The grants were distributed among the five regional centers, each of which is working with selected local health clinics.

The individual health centers will receive assistance from trained clinicians in transitioning to the patient-centered model.

“We believe that if we can get all primary care in Massachusetts to, in some ways, reflect the model of a patient-centered medical home, that both patients and providers would be more satisfied with how primary care works,’’ Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, the state health and human services secretary, said in an interview.

“Primary-care practices are organized around seeing patients generally for 15 or 20 minutes. . . .We know that patients and providers say that is not enough time to spend with a patient,’’ Bigby said.

She said experience has also shown it is not enough time to take care of the typical primary-care illness.

Evidence also suggests that “rather than one single primary-care doctor taking care of a group of patients, we need to focus more on a team approach where a doctor is working with a nurse or a health educator,’’ Bigby said. “Because most people with chronic illnesses . . . need education, they need monitoring to understand how what the doctor is prescribing is helping them. And it shouldn’t just occur in an appointment for 15 minutes every three months.’’

Dr. Somava Stout, medical director of the Revere Family Health Center, welcomed participation in the project. The five-year-old center provides primary care and other services, with 22,000 patient visits in the fiscal year that ended June 30.

Stout said her center already has implemented many of the features of the patient-centered medical home model, including having patients cared for by physician-led teams and maintaining electronic patient records.

“What we will be getting in this collaboration at the state and national levels,’’ Stout said, “is really an opportunity to be part of a learning community of other primary care sites that are trying to make this transition. . . . We can learn from each other, and gain technical assistance.’’

Spurred by its participation in the program, the center in September will start scheduling routine patient appointments within a week’s notice as a way of increasing access to care.

Stout said it makes sense for primary care to move in the direction of the patient-centered medical home approach.

As the nature of healthcare becomes more complex, she said: “It becomes more important than ever for patients to be able to have someone who brings all parts of the system together and helps them understand what they need to do.’’