April 2016 Update

Health is Primary partners with America’s Health Rankings® to release new reportSpotlight: Impact of Unhealthy Behaviors. The report examined five “unhealthy behaviors” – smoking, excessive drinking, insufficient sleep, physical inactivity, obesity – and found that more than 25 million American adults report having multiple unhealthy behaviors (three or more) and, as a result, face more than 6 times greater risk of fair or poor health status than those reporting zero unhealthy behaviors. It also found that:

 Adults with one unhealthy behavior are twice as likely to report fair or poor health status as those with zero unhealthy behaviors.

 The odds of reporting fair or poor health status increase to slightly more than 3.5 times for two unhealthy behaviors, and all the way up to more than 8.5 times for those reporting all five unhealthy behaviors when compared to adults with zero unhealthy behaviors.

The goal of the partnership is to tell the story of how a strong primary care system can improve health behaviors and increase access to prevention. It is also intended to demonstrate the role of primary care in addressing and minimizing health disparities across the country.

Health is Primary holds panel discussion at STFM meeting. The Health is Primary campaign is hosting a one-hour panel discussion during the STFM annual meeting on May 1, 2016 to examine changing models of training in primary care. The session will focus on the rapid shift toward team-based care and look at how family medicine residency programs are evolving to prepare the future work force. Speakers will include Natasha Bhuyan, MD, Mary Hall, MD, Bonnie Jortberg, PhD, RD, CDE and Manisha Sharma, MD.

May is Mental Health Month. Health is Primary will release patient resources focused on managing depression, anxiety and other mental health challenges.

Help Promote Health is Primary. Organizations that would like to promote Health is Primary and the message of primary care are invited to use our tool-kit, which includes posters, social media cards and campaign advertisements for use in journals and other publications. These materials can be found here.

Health is Primary Seeks Stories of Primary Care Innovation. Health is Primary is collecting stories of primary care innovation and transformation. This year, the campaign will focus on California, Georgia, Kansas and Missouri, New Jersey and Kentucky. Please forward stories from those states (or anyplace else in the country!) to [email protected].

This edition of the Monthly Update features the work of the Practice and Technology Teams

Practice Team Update

The Practice Team’s focus is on developing the capability to meet physicians where they are in their practice transformation efforts and help them get to where they would like to go. The team’s mission is to help physicians rediscover the joy of practice and simultaneously meet the Triple Aim of better health, better care and better cost-effectiveness. We’d like to showcase an important project on this update that is important to the Team’s overall effort:

The team is seeking to more deeply understand the landscape of physician readiness to adopt elements of advanced primary care – methods like patient registries, integration with public health, and the use of patient portals to increase patient activation. The team has developed a number of questions related to physician readiness and is seeking to organize focus groups to learn more. If you are interested in taking part in a focus group about physician readiness to adopt advanced primary care methods, please let us know by writing to [email protected]. This effort will heavily inform an upcoming project to develop “Pathways to Practice Transformation” – a method by which physicians and care teams are dynamically connected to pre-existing practice advancement materials based on their readiness, practice model, and payment model.

Technology Team Update

The Technology Team met on April 1 to accelerate the creation of its vision for how technology can enable advanced primary care to meet the Triple Aim in the value-based payment world on the horizon. One major takeaway from this event was the understanding that technology in and of itself can never be the sole agent for change, but rather it can serve as a catalyst for larger scale system-wide improvement. The goal of the Technology Team is that the vision they are creating will be able to pull others in the direction of a more integrated and effective system of health wherein the practice method, payment method, and technology supports are all in alignment and designed to meet the Triple Aim. If you would like to receive updates on the Technology Team’s progress in creating this vision, please write to [email protected].

If either these projects or others you read about in our Monthly Updates sound like efforts in which you’d like to get involved, we would encourage you to visit our engagement portal to learn more and sign up to be a part of FMAHealth: http://cfarsurveys.polldaddy.com/s/fmahealth-engagement

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