Katy Trail Community Health receives national recognition

Katy Trail Community Health has been recognized as a patient-centered medical home.

In this terminology, “home” does not mean a building, institution or a house. Instead, it’s a model, or a hub.

Katy Trail’s website says: “A health care home is a location that delivers health care that is accessible, continuous, comprehensive, compassionate, and culturally effective.”

The recognition was done by the National Committee for Quality Assurance, a private, nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., that accredits and certifies a wide range of health care organizations, including hospitals, clinics and insurance companies.

Katy Trail is the first in the West Central Missouri area to achieve this distinction. Both of its clinics in Sedalia and Warsaw were recognized.

Chris Stewart, chief executive director, further explained the patient-centered model in a telephone interview last week. “The Affordable Care Act focuses on shifting treatment from the treatment of illness to preventing illness,” she said. “The patient-center medical home promotes a model of care to coordinate how we deliver that care.”

She said that the typical medical model focuses on people seeing doctors when they are sick. Sometimes doctors refer the patient to other doctors, but it is up to the patient to see other doctors and get the prescriptions and treatments they need.

She said that often with this model, “Folks fall through the cracks.”

In the patient-centered model, focus is on teamwork, quality care, chronic disease management and prevention.

In this model, Stewart said, “Whoever the care provider is, if it’s a doctor, that doctor is responsible for your care no matter where you go.

“If a patient needed a referral to surgery, we see that the patient gets there.”

She added: “I like to say the loop is closed. This model puts a patient at the center of health care,” rather than the doctor.

Stewart said Katy Trail “had to prove that that is what we were doing” in order to get the recognition, which required an extensive survey.

“It took a year to do this,” she said.