The military health system: A community of solutions for medical education, health care delivery, and public health

Multiple strategies have been proposed to improve health care in the United States. These include the development of communities of solution (COSs), implementation of patient-centered medical homes (PCMHs), and lengthening family medicine residency training. There is scant literature on how to build and integrate these ideal models of care, and no literature about how to build a model of care integrating all 3 strategies is available. The Military Health System has adopted the PCMH model and will offer some 4-year family medicine residency positions starting in 2013. Lengthening residency training to 4 years represents an unprecedented opportunity to weave experiential COS instruction throughout a family physician's graduate medical education, providing future family physicians the skills needed to foster a COS in their future practice. This article describes our COS effort to synergize 3 aspects of modern military medicine: self-defined community populations, the transition to the PCMH model, and the initiation of the 4-year length of training pilot program in family medicine residency training. In this way we provide a starting point and general how-to guide that can be used to create a COS integrated with other current concepts in medicine.