A recent first-of-its-kind survey deployed to 15,000 family medicine physicians by the American Board of Family Medicine, highlights the critical importance of continuous doctor-patient relationships in primary care.

Of those responding, almost all agree that continuous doctor-patient relationships over time translates into optimal patient care, improved diagnoses, and better patient outcomes. Evidence shows that these relationships lead to lower costs, higher patient satisfaction, increased professional satisfaction for physicians, burnout prevention, and better health outcomes in a wide range of chronic disease areas.

Nearly 8 in 10 family doctors believe that continuity of doctor-patient relationships is a better measure of their work as a primary care professional than most existing quality measures used by health plans to assess their performance.

The survey comes at a time when the Core Quality Measures Collaborative (CQMC) just announced that a Continuity of Care Measure would be included in their “core measure set” – a group of measures that should be adopted by public and private sector health plans and used for payment and performance improvement. An announcement from AHIP and CMS was released in August 2023.