Publications > Implementing Medicaid Health Homes in New York: Early Experience

New York State’s health home initiative is one of the most ambitious of its kind in the nation. The program seeks to establish a care management and coordination vehicle for Medicaid enrollees with chronic conditions.

This report details the early stages of implementing the health homes initiative: enrolling beneficiaries, determining payment rates, building relationships, measuring quality, and other operational necessities. While the challenges the initiative faces are consistent with the scale of the changes it seeks to achieve, the experiences of some providers are models for how health homes can work effectively. Because the most complex and costly Medicaid beneficiaries drive the majority of program spending in the State, the stakes are high, but strong federal support provides needed assistance up front. Delivering two years of health home coordination services to all 224,000 first-wave individuals could cost about $1.2 billion, with about $1.1 billion paid by the federal government—funding that will help New York better control its long-term Medicaid cost growth.