Question How do the quality and experience of outpatient care differ between adults with or without an endorsed source of primary care?
Findings In this nationally representative survey study of 49 286 adults with and 21 133 adults without primary care, Americans with primary care received significantly more high-value care (4 of 5 composites), received slightly more low-value care (3 of 4 composites), and reported significantly better health care access and experience. These differences were stable from 2002 to 2014.
Nearly five years ago, leaders at Bellin Health in Green Bay, Wis., recognized that their employed primary-care physicians were burning out at least partyl due to too many hours spent on recordkeeping and not enough on direct patient care. In addition, nurses and other staffers besides physicians felt their skills weren't being fully utilized. Quality scores had plateaued, with significant variation between primaty-care sites.
Peers for Progress reports opportunities, challenges for community health workers
As patient-centered medical homes (PCMHs) continue to gain steam, a new report reinforces the fact that the model's mission of lowering costs and improving access to care relies on the use of peer support from community health workers (CHWs).
Before the explosion of managed care, electronic health records (EHRs), hospital mega-mergers, and just before the rise of hospitalists, primary care physicians had a very different role.
Leaders in the field who have practiced over several decades have different ideas about what has had the biggest effect in the last 20 years, but all agree they see their careers very differently than they did in 1995.
When 62-year-old Rod Larson of Minneapolis was found to have a rapidly worsening bacterial skin infection, his primary care doctor immediately sent him to the hospital.
On arrival, Larson was put in a room and examined by a physician assistant. He didn’t stop at the admissions office because his information and treatment orders already had been placed into the hospital computer system.
Calvin Sia, MD, Christine Sinsky, MD, and Melinda Abrams, MS, to receive awards at PCPCC Annual Fall Conference Awards Dinner
WASHINGTON – Today the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC) announced the recipients of its 2015 leadership awards. Dr. Calvin Sia will receive the group’s prestigious Barbara Starfield Primary Care Leadership Award during PCPCC’s Annual Awards Dinner at its Fall Conference on Nov. 11, 2015. Dr. Sia is a retired primary care pediatrician who spent much of his career advancing the medical home concept in his home state of Hawaii as well as nationally and internationally.
An internist’s cancer scare helps show her how care can be improved.
As an internist and infectious disease physician, I am, unfortunately, often the one who has to deliver bad news to patients and their families. But this time, as I sat in the urologist’s office in January, the dreaded words were directed at me: “You likely have cancer.”
The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) model challenges primary care providers to raise the bar on care coordination, population health management, clinical analytics, and access to care, but healthcare organizations that undertake these important quality transformations are usually left to foot the bill themselves. In a reimbursement landscape that remains, for the most part, rooted in fee-for-service payment, the incentive to pay out of pocket for these massive and costly changes can be hard to find.
