Lana Matveyeva, center, a certified nursing assistant, joins other members of the pediatric team in their room in the Mid-County Health Center in Southeast Portland. The seven-member team, one of seven at the clinic, provides the kind of coordinated, patient-centered care that the state is racing to deliver to all 600,000 members of the Oregon Health Plan under the state's new health reform initiative. — Faith Cathcart photo/The Oregonian
Bill Graves, writing in The Oregonian:
Care teams at Mid-County and other clinics operated by Multnomah County offer a glimpse of the future for the Oregon Health Plan’s 600,000 low-income and disabled people on Medicaid and Medicare.
The centerpiece of health reform legislation passed this year calls for teams of doctors, dentists, therapists, nurses, health coaches and others to deliver consistent, integrated primary care with an emphasis on prevention.
It also calls for hustle. Groups of health workers, advocates and consumers are racing to hammer out the details.
The state budget assumes the transformed health plan will be up and running next summer — quickly enough to save $249 million in Medicaid costs in the second year of the 2011-13 biennium. If it doesn’t, the state will have to find money to fill the hole or cut Medicaid payments, already down 11 percent this year.
Critics say Oregon can’t carry out change statewide that fast.
But Dr. Bruce Goldberg, director of the Oregon Health Authority, argues otherwise.
“We can do this,” he says. “We’ve got a long history of making change.”
Much of the article is written from the point of view of the patient. It’s worth reading the whole story at OregonLive.
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