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Primary Care

In Legislation/On the Hill

Family Medicine Welcomes Primary Care Workforce Access Improvement Act
American Academy of Family Physicians
December 15, 2011

"Family medicine educators and family physicians today hailed the introduction of the “Primary Care Workforce Access Improvement Act of 2011” as an important step toward ensuring that Americans have access to needed health care in the future."

Medicare Federally Qualified Health Center Advanced Primary Care Practice Demonstration
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
October 24, 2011

"On October 24, 2011, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that 500 Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) have been selected for the FQHC Advanced Primary Care Practice (APCP) demonstration project from over 800 applicants.  The initiative is designed to evaluate the impact of the advanced primary care practice model, also known as the patient-centered medical home, on improving health, improving quality of care, and lowering the cost of care provided to Medicare beneficiaries served by FQHCs."

Tags: Health Centers, Medical Home
Making Good on ACOs' Promise — The Final Rule for the Medicare Shared Savings Program
The New England Journal of Medicine
October 20, 2011

"ACOs are voluntary groups of physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers that are willing to assume responsibility for the care of a clearly defined population of Medicare beneficiaries attributed to them on the basis of patients' use of primary care services. If an ACO succeeds in both delivering high-quality care or improving care and reducing the cost of that care below what would otherwise have been expected, it will share in the savings it achieves for Medicare."

Tags: Health Centers
Medicare tests monthly incentives for innovative primary care
American Medical News
October 10, 2011

"Medicare will partner with private insurers to offer physicians patient management fees and the opportunity to share savings under a primary care payment initiative led by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The Comprehensive Primary Care Initiative is a new collaboration between public and private payers to strengthen primary care, CMS officials said during a Sept. 28 news conference. The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation is inviting insurers to join government health plans in trying a new approach to paying for primary care starting in 2012."

Tags: Medicare/Medicaid
Doctor supply hamstrung by residency gap
Georgia Health News
October 7, 2011

"Georgia has a medical export problem. Three of every four graduates of Georgia medical schools this year went to do their residency training in other states. That’s important because the bulk of physicians end up practicing within 60 miles of where they did their training. And Georgia is also mired in a doctor shortage that shows no sign of easing."

Tags: Graduate Medical Education
More Primary Care Legislation

News

Primary care residency program unveiled
The News-Times
February 21, 2012

"Local and state officials including Gov. Dannel P. Malloy announced Tuesday a new primary care physician residency program in the city. The program is the first of its kind in the state, officials said, and includes both a community-based health care center ,as well as Danbury and New Milford hospitals -- part of the Western Connecticut Health Network."

Tags: Graduate Medical Education
Why Medical Students Aren't Choosing Primary Care (and why they should)
Primary Care Progress
February 16, 2012

"Most articles about why medical students don’t choose primary care will say that a career in primary care simply won’t pay off the enormous debt accrued in medical school. Indeed, the average 2010 graduate came away $157,944 in debt. And primary care salaries are in fact far lower than those of other specialties, a disparity that is increasing. However, I repeatedly ask medical students if they would choose a career in primary care if it would completely erase their student loan debt. A few hands go up, but not many."

Tags: Medical Students
Lack of primary and preventative care sends thousands to hospitals
U~T San Diego
February 20, 2012

"Better access to primary health care and prevention programs could have kept thousands of California adults out of hospitals, according to a new statewide analysis."

A push to train more primary-care doctors
Los Angeles Times
February 19, 2012

"To address the shortage, new medical schools are opening with an emphasis on primary care and others are changing their curricula to boost the number of graduates interested in the field. Medical school professors are pairing students with family doctors and assigning them to community clinics so they see firsthand what it's like to practice preventive care and manage chronic diseases."

Tags: Medical Students
Family care doctors are in high demand
CBS News
February 18, 2012

"The federal government this week awarded $9.1 million to medical students in 30 states and the District of Columbia. The recipients will serve as primary care doctors. As CBS News correspondent Whit Johnson reports, fewer and fewer medical students can afford to become family doctors at a time of growing need."

Tags: Family Medicine, Workforce Shortage
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Policy Briefs

Rural Residency Training for Family Medicine Physicians: Graduate Early-Career Outcomes
WWAMI Rural Health Research Center
January 2012

"The 14 RTTs in this study each graduated an average of two physicians per year. This rate of output is comparable to that of all 24 RTTs nationwide, which collectively matriculate about 45 to 50 new physicians annually."

Tags: Family Medicine, Graduate Medical Education, Rural
Matching Supply to Demand: Addressing the U.S. Primary Care Workforce Shortage
National Institute for Health Care Reform
December 2011

 

"While there is little debate about a growing primary care workforce shortage in the United States, precise estimates of current and projected need vary. A secondary problem contributing to addressing capacity shortfalls is that the distribution of primary care practitioners often is mismatched with patient needs."
Tags: Workforce Shortage
Primary Care Workforce Facts and Stats
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
November 2011

"To further inform policy discussions around the U.S. primary care workforce, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is producing a set of fact sheets to provide health care policy and decision makers with information on the U.S. primary care workforce."

Bending the Health Cost Curve in North Carolina: The Experience of Community Health Centers
Geiger Gibson/RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative
August 9, 2011

"North Carolina is known for innovative practices in primary care delivery and education, and accordingly one might expect to see greater efficiencies overall in care delivery, and less direct, measurable impact by community health centers on cost and outcome. Of interest is whether community health centers (CHCs) are cost-effective providers in states with a sophisticated primary care infrastructure and focus on the needs of medically underserved communities."

Tags: Health Centers
The Universal Appeal of Community Health Centers
Center for American Progress
August 3, 2011

"Community health centers are a crucial source of health care for a diverse group of patients, providing preventive services, treatment, and care management for medically underserved communities. That’s why these centers have enjoyed solid bipartisan support over the past several decades."

Tags: Health Centers
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Reports

Report to Congress: Aligning Incentives in Medicare
MedPAC
June 2010

"Despite the tremendous advances that our GME system has brought to modern health care, the Commission finds it is not consistently producing physicians and other health professionals who can become leaders in reforming our delivery system to substantially improve its quality and value. Two specific areas of concern are workforce mix—including trends in specialization and limited socioeconomic diversity—and education and training in skills needed for improving the value of our health care delivery system—including evidence-based medicine, team-based care, care coordination, and shared decision making."

Report: Innovation Key to Improving Primary Care
California Healthcare Foundation
November 2011

"The next few years of health reform in the United States will witness the influx of millions of new patients seeking health care. Primary care providers (PCPs) are in the best position to deliver care to the millions of new patients entering the health system. However, not enough providers are in place in the United States to meet even existing demands for services."

Tags: Workforce Shortage
Primary Care Workforce Facts and Stats No. 1
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
October 2011

"In 2010, there were approximately 209,000 practicing primary care physicians in the U.S., according to research commissioned by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality."

Modernizing Rural Health Care: Coverage, quality and innovation
UnitedHealth Center for Health Reform & Modernization
July 2011

This paper includes: new empirical research on rural versus urban, quality of care; new projections for rural Medicaid and insurance exchange 2014 coverage expansions; new state-by-state and county-level analysis of future pressure on primary care capacity; new models for rural care delivery and care coordination; and, new national consumer and primary care physician survey data.
 

Tags: Medicare/Medicaid, Rural
Informing Rural Primary Care Workforce Policy: What Does the Evidence Tell Us?
Rural Health Research and Policy Centers
April 2011

"This literature review profiles 51 publications constituting the body of evidence-based research produced by the federally-funded Rural Health Research Centers (RHRCs) from 2000 to 2010 which is relevant to the rural primary care workforce."

More Primary Care Reports

Research

Primary Care Attributes and Mortality: A National Person-Level Study
Annals of Family Medicine
January/February 2012

"Research demonstrates an association between the geographic concentration of primary care clinicians and mortality in the area, but there is limited evidence of a mortality benefit of primary care at the individual patient level. We examined whether patient-reported access to selected primary care attributes, including some emphasized in the medical home literature, is associated with lower individual mortality risk."

Primary Care Part I: Selected Presentations and A Course in Primary Care
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
February 2012

"Part I of Dr. Starfield's update of her seminal books, Primary Care: Concept, Evaluation, and Policy and Primary Care: Balancing Health Needs, Services, and Technology, comprises 6 invited lectures plus an 11-lecture course that examines the meaning, practice, and effectiveness of primary care. Topics include disease, morbidity, primary care innovations, health equities and disparities, prevention, and specialist care."

How do medical students view the work life of primary care and specialty physicians?
Family Medicine
January 2012

"Student perceptions of day-today physician work life, and relationships between these perceptions and specialty choices, have not been quantitatively explored. The study’s purposes were to measure student perceptions of primary care and specialist physician work life, including administrative burden, time pressures, autonomy, and relationships with patients, to determine whether senior students’ perceptions vary from junior students’ perceptions and to determine whether students with primary care career plans view primary care work life differently than their peers."

Tags: Medical Students
Primary Care 2025
Institute for Alternative Futures
January 2012

"Primary Care 2025: A Scenario Exploration is a project developed by the Institute for Alternative Futures (IAF) with support from the Kresge Foundation to consider the range of forces, challenges, and opportunities shaping primary care in the United States. Complex change comes as new technologies meet an aging society in a time of growing economic and political divides. This is not a time for reactive decisions based only on a view of past trends in health care. The inherently uncertain future of primary care in a time of great flux means that a systemic understanding of future possibilities is all the more important for informing what we do today and tomorrow."

Primary Care Workforce Facts and Stats No. 3
Agency for Health Care Research and Quality
January 2012

"This fact sheet shows that primary care physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants are more likely to practice in rural areas than are non-primary care specialists, but are still more concentrated in urban areas."

Tags: Rural, Workforce Shortage
More Primary Care Research
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