Medicine

Social determinants key to the future of Primary Care

A "Perspective" in the September 6 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, "Becoming a physician: the developing vision of primary care"[1] by Kathleen A. Barnes, Jason C. Kroening-Roche, and Branden W. Comfort*, addresses the change in the practice of primary care enabled by changes in payment and structure and how this is more attractive to medical students. All three are medical students (although Kroening-Roche already has both his MD and MPH) from schools in different parts of the country (Harvard, Oregon, and Kansas); they met at the Harvard School of Public Health, and all of whom seem to be interested in being primary care physicians. They describe a model – or, more accurately, as they say, a vision – of primary care practice in which they see themselves in the future, and about which they are enthusiastic. By extension, one would hope that this is also true of many other medical students.

The practice that they describe is quite detailed in many ways:

"…a day in a primary care office would begin with a team huddle….The team would discuss the day's patients and their concerns. They would review quality metrics, emphasize their quality-improvement cycle for the week, and celebrate the team's progress in caring for its community of patients…The RN would manage his or her own panel of patients with stable chronic disease, calling them with personal reminders and using physician-directed protocols…The social worker, nutritionist, and behavioral therapist would work with the physician to address the layers of complexity involved in keeping patients healthy. Clinic visits would ideally be nearly twice as long as they are now…"

It sounds great. As the authors note, there are practices that are working toward, and in some cases have begun to achieve this "new model" of care; these 3 did not originate these ideas. Practitioners and thinkers such as Tom Bodenheimer, Joe Scherger, Bob Phillips, and Kevin Grumbach have written about this, and many practices, particularly integrated groups such as Kaiser Permanente, Inter-Mountain Health Care, and Geisinger Clinic have implemented many of these characteristics. But will it be the future of all health care? Will, importantly, these changes – or ones like them – both provide the functionality that the health system needs from primary care and the physicians entering into this practice?

In many articles, including Transforming primary care: from past practice to the practice of the future [2], Bodenheimer has emphasized the need for teams from a practical standpoint – there are more people needing care and not enough primary care physicians to provide it. Phillips ("O Brother Where Art Thou: An Odyssey for Generalism", presented at the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine Annual Conference in May, 2011) shows data indicating that even including "mid-level providers" such as advanced practice nurses and physician's assistants there are way too few primary care providers, and the trajectory of production is in the wrong direction. Our own data[3] show the marked decrease in the number of medical students entering family medicine (and other primary care specialties) in the last dozen years. So it is profoundly to be hoped that the model of care described by these authors develops, that they are able to develop it, and that it will attract more future physicians.

While practice change is hard, and culture change is harder, there are issues that these authors talk about but do not seem to overly worry them. They note the importance of the Affordable Care Act, and how it "…emphasizes population health and primary care services, and establishes accountable care organizations that require strong primary care foundations," but do not, in my opinion, adequately address two key challenges to implementation that will present profound obstacles to the achievement of their vision.

The first is payment, reimbursement, allocation of health care dollars. They assume that, "…thanks to a restructured reimbursement system," medical assistants will "…have protected time to provide health coaching for behavior change and to ensure that the patients on their panel were current with their preventive care." Because reimbursement would be "…through global payments linking hospitals to primary care practices, the physician, too, would have a financial incentive to keep patients healthy…." It is a great model, and one that I agree with, but it hasn't happened in most places. Because it is more costly and requires significant investment in prevention and primary care, and since there are unlikely to be additional dollars in the health system, it will mean lower reimbursement for hospitalizations, for procedures, and for the specialists who are the currently the most highly paid. This, I would argue, would not be a bad thing, but it will not happen easily. Those who are doing well under the current system are going to fight to hold on to it, and the reimbursement structure is not changing quickly enough to push such change outside of integrated health systems – and even within many of them.

The second is what can be summarized as the "social determinants of health". Good public health students, they observe that "…the health care system must strive to affect more than the 10% of premature mortality that is influenced by medical treatment," and note correctly that "Primary care cannot be primary without the recognition that it is communities that experience health and sickness. Providing better health care is imperative but insufficient."

This is true, but there is more to it. Health care, in itself, even well-organized with adequate numbers of primary care practices working in teams, and collaborating with public health workers, and going out into the community, and employing culturally-competent health navigators/guides/case managers/promotoras, is not going to do it alone. The social determinants of health have to be addressed by the entire society.

Poverty, unstable housing, food insecurity, cold, and the social threats that often accompany the communities in which they are prevalent (violence, drug use, abuse, etc.) will continue to create situations in which people are not healthy and need medical care. Even in the larger society, in the part where people are not living at the edge, there are many anti-health forces; stress (including the stress of working harder and at more jobs to keep away from the edge), the ubiquity and ease of access of poor quality, high-calorie food, and the shredding of the social safety net that is almost gone for at the bottom and fraying at the sides (Social Security, Medicare), are not harbingers of a happier, healthier society.

I am thrilled about the enthusiasm of these young physicians and physicians-to-be, and their commitment to primary care and a new kind of practice. They begin by observing, echoing Bob Dylan from 50 years ago, and more important the movement that was growing then, that "times are changing", but I fear we are not yet clear what that change will be; there is tremendous energy – and even more money – behind a change that will be for the worse for everyone except the most privileged.

They end by saying that "We are here to engage in and advance the movement." They are talking about transforming primary care, but I hope that they and their colleagues recognize that it will not be enough unless they are willing to engage in and advance the movement to transform society.

*In full disclosure, one of the authors, Branden Comfort, is a student at the KU School of Medicine. Although he has spent his clinical years at our Wichita campus, I know him well because we worked together in the student run free clinic (and he was my advisee) in his first two years here in Kansas City.

[1] Barnes KA, Kroening-Roche JC, Comfort BW, "The developing vision of primary care", NEJM Sept 6, 2012;367(10):891-4.

[2] Margolius D, Bodenheimer T, Transforming primary care: from past practice to the practice of the future, Health Aff (Millwood). 2010 May;29(5):779-84.

[3] Freeman J, Delzell J, ""Medical School Graduates Entering Family Medicine: Increasing The Overall Number", Family Medicine, October 2012, in press.

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