Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education
Open Access

Research Article

Factors Associated with a Patient Centered Medical Home among Obese and Overweight Children

¹Department of Health Policy and Administration, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, USA

²Institute for Child Health Policy, Department of Health Outcomes and Policy, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA

*Corresponding Author:

Caprice Knapp
Department of Health Policy and Administration
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA 16820, USA
Tel: (814) 863-2900
E-mail: cxk47@psu.edu

Received date: January 09, 2015; Accepted date: February 28, 2015; Published date: March 03, 2015

Citation: Knapp C, Alford S, Ranka R (2015) Factors Associated with a Patient Centered Medical Home among Obese and Overweight Children. J Community Med Health Educ 5:331. doi: 10.4172/2161-0711.1000331

Copyright: © 2015 Knapp C, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Objective: This study aims to determine the frequency of overweight and obese children that have a Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH), the factors associated, and the effect of having one on several common child outcomes. Methods: 43,501 children from the 2011-2012 National Survey of Children’s Health were analysed for this study. Descriptive, bivariate, and multivariate analyses were conducted. Results: Parents report that 54% of overweight and obese children have a patient centered medical home. Results from the multivariate models suggest that just being overweight and obese was not associated with having a medical home. However, when comorbidities were accounted for overweight and obese children were less likely to have a medical home and had decreased outcomes as compared to their underweight/healthy weight peers. Obese and overweight children with comorbidities were more likely to have a personal doctor but less likely to have effective care coordination. Conclusions: The PCMH is a model that could be used to improve health and health outcomes for the most vulnerable children. However, obesity should be taken as a chronic condition just as other conditions and addressed on a routine bases. The PCMH model offers a vehicle to develop and implement population-based processes to identify, assess, and manage care for these children.

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