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.
New Podcast: Dr. Robert Phillips Discusses the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Recent Report, ” Implementing High-Quality Primary Care”
- Robert L. Phillips Jr., MD, MSPH
- Dr. Bob Phillips
Submitted on: June, 2021
Among numerous other statistics, despite spending approximately twice what comparative countries spend on healthcare, the US has highest rates of preventable deaths. Even wealthy Americans are more likely to, for example, die during childbirth, from cancer and from heart attacks than those in 12 comparative countries. This is substantially due to the fact primary care in the US, as the National Academy of Medicine report states in its opening, is “slowly dying.” The report further notes despite the fact primary care’s value is beyond dispute, approximately 25% of Americans do not have a primary care physician and 80 million Americans live, per HRSA, in primary care health professions shortage areas. In turn, this is largely due to the fact only 5% of healthcare spending goes to primary care despite such visits accounting for 40% of all medical office visits. Translation: primary care physicians are substantially undercompensated that contributes to a growing shortage of primary care clinicians.
Ensuring Primary Care Diagnostic Quality in the Era of Telemedicine
- Joel Steven Willis, DO, PA, MA, MPhi
- Carl Tyler Jr., MD, MSc
- Gordon D. Schiff, MD
- Katherine Schreiner, BA
Submitted on: June, 2021
Telemedicine applications have been utilized for decades, most commonly in specific areas of medicine (e.g., dermatology, pathology, radiology) and in specific contexts, (e.g., rural or other under-resourced areas).
Adjusting Medicare Payments For Social Risk To Better Support Social Needs
- Robert L. Phillips Jr., MD, MSPH
- Andrew W. Bazemore, MD, MPH
- Andrey Ostrovsky
Submitted on: June, 2021
Social determinants of health have greater influence on health than does health care, yet Medicare and most other payers have yet to adjust payments to better support the capacity of health care providers to address social needs. The 2014 Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation (IMPACT) Act directed the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to review evidence linking social risk with performance under existing federal payment systems and to suggest policy options. In response, HHS produced two reports and commissioned a series of five additional reports from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). The second HHS report suggests that area-based (or, geographically based) measures of social deprivation could play a role in payment adjustment.