Health is Primary to Co-Host Capitol Hill Briefing. Health is Primary will co-host a briefing for Members of Congress and staff Thursday, March 23. The briefing will be held in collaboration with the Congressional Primary Care Caucus, which is co-chaired by Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT) and Rep. David Rouzer (R-NC). Panelists will discuss innovation and transformation in primary care and the importance of collaboration within the medical neighborhood.
March is Care Coordination Month. This month the Health is Primary campaign is focusing on care coordination. You can download our monthly toolkit, which includes tear sheets for patients on care coordination and the March calendar, which provides ideas to promote the value of care coordination in primary care.
Health is Primary to Sponsor AHR Summit on the Future of Health Insurance. Health is Primary will sponsor a bi-partisan summit hosted by the Alliance for Health Reform on the Future of Health Insurance. This well-timed event will be held April 7 on Capitol Hill. It will examine the challenges of the current health insurance system, along with next steps for the individual and group markets, including the options for health insurance marketplaces or their replacements.
Help Us Promote a Unified Message About Primary Care. A strong primary care system is critical to a high functioning, cost effective health care system, and we need your voice. For suggestions about how to promote our message and engage on social media, see our 2017 campaign calendar, posters and infographics.
Update from the Strategy Implementation Team:
Payment Team Begins Work on Helping Employed Physicians Receive Compensation for the Value They Provide. The Payment Team has begun a qualitative study of the value that employed physicians provide to the physician groups and health systems that employ them. The team is currently moving the project through institutional review board (IRB) approval at the University of Alabama. The project’s objective is to help employed family physicians and their practice teams receive adequate compensation, both financial and otherwise, for the value they provide the health systems and physician groups that employ them. The first step is to understand how that value is estimated by their employers. The project team expects to begin conducting interviews with health system executives and employed physicians in April.
The Payment Team in collaboration with a health care analytics firm continues its work on the Comprehensive Primary Care Payment Calculator. The Calculator is being designed to calculate the cost and demonstrate the value of comprehensive primary care payment. The
team began development in December and is expecting the Calculator to be ready for initial testing in June. The Calculator will be a critical component of building the business case for comprehensive primary care payment for family physicians, employers and insurers. The qualitative study of family physicians and their practices already working in a comprehensive primary care payment framework has completed its second round of interviews. After gathering and analyzing findings from the first and second wave of interviews, the project team is focused on drafting and submitting its findings for publication and presentation later in 2017.
To learn more about these projects, please contact Jack Janson at [email protected].
Set of Shared Principles of Primary Care to Be Finalized Soon. The Engagement Team and the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC) co-hosted a summit on November 11. The goal of this summit was to identify a set of Shared Principles of Person Centered, Team Based Primary Care that can be supported and put into practice by diverse primary care professional organizations, patients, patient advocates and other stakeholders. Over 100 people from almost as many organizations attended the Summit. The Steering Committee for the project, itself a diverse group that includes a number of family medicine representatives, then created a first version of the Shared Principles.
After inviting the FMAHealth Board, the eight family medicine organizations and the PCPCC Board to review the first version, the Steering Committee created a much improved next version. The latest version will go out for review by hundreds of primary care stakeholders through a final survey. The Steering Committee will use their feedback to finalize the Shared Principles.
The finalized Shared Principles will be the first step for the team. The next big challenge will be garnering the support of the many stakeholders and implementing the principles. If you want to be included in the survey and/or want to see the latest version of the Shared Principles for Primary Care, let us know. Contact Jason Ring at [email protected].
