Innovation Crucial To Meet Growing Demand For PCPs
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
A recent study indicates healthcare must adapt to advance primary care delivery.
As much as 8 percent of national healthcare spending comes from primary care – approximately $200 to $250 billion – and visits to primary care physicians (PCPs) account for more than 55 percent of annual physician office encounters each year. The ACA is poised to generate an additional 25 million PCP visits as a result of increased coverage, elimination of copayments for preventive services, and required coverage for particular health benefits.
To meet this growing demand for PCP coverage, a report from UnitedHealth Group suggests innovation is the key.
The study, Advancing Primary Care Delivery: Practical, Proven, and Scalable Approaches, underscores the importance of primary care physicians in providing high-quality, cost-effective healthcare, but also reveals that as many as 50 million Americans live in locations that do not have an adequate supply of PCPs, predominantly in rural areas.
To help meet the demand, the study urges healthcare delivery systems leverage nurse practitioners and physician assistants, patient-centered medical homes, multi-disciplinary care teams, and health information technology to ensure proper patient care.
Among proven approaches to providing adequate care, according to the study, are leveraging clinics in large retail outlets, delivering care in patients' homes, utilizing group visits, and engaging patients with complex needs by mapping patient clinical characteristics to utilization levels and payment models that support resource-intensive targeting and care management efforts.
Ultimately, the report states, "There is no single set of clinical, organizational, and financial models that successfully expands primary care capacity and improves service delivery. The approaches examined in this report offer multiple complementary pathways that can be tailored to local market conditions and policy environments.
“When implemented successfully, their common threads include focusing on the patient; the quality of service delivery, rather than who is delivering care and in what setting; and paying for value. These approaches challenge longstanding assumptions about the scale, pace, and intensity of change that are both possible and necessary."