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Social and economic factors impact a person’s health outcomes in addition to traditional clinical factors, and there is growing recognition of the impact of social risk factors on health outcomes.1,2 National health insurers like Medicare and Medicaid, which pay for care for people who are the most at risk for experiencing health disparities, need measures of social risk to implement targeted programming and payment allocation to equitably prevent rehospitalizations.
Dr. Robert Phillips, MD, Executive Director of the Center for Professionalism and Value in Health Care, American Board of Family Medicine, and Professor of Family Medicine at Georgetown University and Virginia Commonwealth University discusses the American Board of Family Medicine’s new survey which highlights the importance of doctor-patient relationships in primary care and efforts to measure and support the improvements.
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.
