Publications
The Center exists in part to create original evidence and information that support and advance conversations around professionalism, value, and other health care issues.
READ about scientific publications, briefs, and reports emerging from the Center and its collaborators below.
The COVID-19 Tsunami: The Tide Goes Out Before It Comes In
- Robert L. Phillips Jr., MD, MSPH
- Andrew W. Bazemore, MD, MPH
- Aaron Baum
Submitted on: April, 2020
Most people in the US have withdrawn from their daily routines unless their jobs are essential. Quiet streets, shuttered stores, silent schools. More than 400,000 live with the knowledge that they have the disease, but the slowness of our testing means that multiples of that number are likely to be infected. In pockets around the country, hospitals feel the earliest surges from those most vulnerable to COVID-19, but countrywide, the tsunami is still out at sea.
The devastating effects of a tsunami are usually preceded by an abnormally fast and long low tide, as water is actually pulled away from shore toward the epicenter of the underwater earthquake. Most of the US currently sits in that temporary equipoise. Most Americans who receive any health care in a given year do so in a primary care setting, where they generally have the relationships that they count on most when they are sick—or scared that they might be.
Coronavirus: Family physicians provide telehealth care at risk of bankruptcy
- Dr. John M. Westfall
Submitted on: April, 2020
While Emergency Departments, hospitals, and intensive care units are in the headlines for their battles against the growing wave of COVID-19 infections, a quieter, but just as dire, struggle unfolds in primary care offices all over the country. Primary care clinicians have been asked to keep our patients safe from COVID-19, screen them, tell them what medicines to use, when to stay home and when to go to the ER. And we are trying to maintain personalized delivery of acute, chronic and preventive services for all our patients. Everyone has been asked to practice social distancing, but we are trying to use our ongoing patient relationships to enable physical distancing with social connectedness.
Family Medicine and Comprehensiveness of Care: What are the Risks of Declines in Scope of Practice?
- Elizabeth G. Baxley, MD
- Robert L. Phillips Jr., MD, MSPH
- Andrew W. Bazemore, MD, MPH
Submitted on: March, 2020
The late Barbara Starfield declared comprehensiveness – caring for patients and families across the spectrum of their lives and providing most of the care that they need – to be one of the four foundational virtues of primary care. Family medicine has long prided itself as being the most comprehensive of the primary care disciplines, with training to care for patients across the widest array of health care delivery settings and services, and from “cradle to grave.” Many of us cherish this breadth and depth as fundamental to our specialty choice and attribute broad scope of care as one of the things that brings us joy in practice. Despite this, there has been a general reduction in the scope of practice among family physicians over the last 20 years. Fewer family physicians care for pregnant women; see children; and attend to the care of their hospitalized patients.
