Most Influential: Drs. Michael Soman & Rod Hochman

With the nation riveted to health care reform, Drs. Soman and Hochman are sitting on something that may go a long way toward solving the country’s health care woes

Dr. Michael Soman [ President and Chief Medical Executive, Group Health Permanente ]

Dr. Rod Hochman [ CEO, Swedish Medical Center ]

With the nation riveted to health care reform, Drs. Soman and Hochman are sitting on something that may go a long way toward solving the country’s health care woes. Both are proponents of “medical home,” a health care model that uses a team approach to patient care, giving primary care physicians more time with patients, while also ramping up the management of chronic disease and disease prevention—all at a lower cost. Soman convinced Group Health to pilot the approach at its Factoria clinic in 2007, adding an element that had been lacking in the medical home world: a study to scientifically measure its outcomes. When the one-year pilot was complete, the data was so overwhelmingly positive—high patient and physician satisfaction, monetary savings—that Group Health is rolling the model out at all 26 of its clinics. Meanwhile, when Swedish decided to open a clinic in Ballard this year, Hochman saw an opportunity to build it around medical home. “The approach is all about health care delivery,” says Hochman, who agrees that medical home improves quality and holds down costs.

Soman believes medical home—which allows docs to carry a smaller daily patient load, relieving them of what he calls “the hamster wheel”—will have another benefit: encouraging medical students to choose primary care medicine over other specialties, something critical to the health of health care. “There’s enormous international and national data that shows that heavily primary-care-based decisions have better [patient] outcomes at lower cost,” Soman says. “If primary care crumbles, the whole health care system will crumble.”