The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) in collaboration with The Physicians Foundation, and the Milbank Memorial Fund has produced a national scorecard with state-level distinctions to assess the state of primary healthcare in the country.
The report is expected to act as a baseline for improvement to be made to the sector in the future. It is titled, “The Health of US Primary Care: A Baseline Scorecard Tracking Support for High-Quality Primary Care.”
Performance metrics were based on 5 categories, workforce, access, financing, training, and research.
The report was developed in response to a 2021 call by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). The organization had called for establishing an annual tracking tool that can be used over time as a benchmark to measure the progress of primary healthcare in America.
According to Christopher Koller, Milbank Memorial Fund President, the primary healthcare system is in need of severe reform and the scorecard can serve as an essential tool for relevant stakeholders and policy-makers to bring it about. Koller thinks that the scorecard can be used to pursue policies that can increase investments in high-quality primary care.
In the report, certain objectives for the future were highlighted and then compared to where the sector stood presently. For example, one objective of the report is to ensure that in the future high quality primary care is available to every member of the community but findings suggest that there are increasing gaps in care and the workforce is shrinking.
In determining access to care the report found that from 2010 to 2019 the percentage of adults that had no usual source of care aside from an emergency room rose from 23.6% to 29%. This number dramatically fell to 27% by 2020 and this change has been attributed to the expansion of the Affordable Care Act coverage.
Another aim of the report is to ensure that primary care teams are trained where people actually live and work because presently there are many geographical discrepancies in this regard. In some states, less than 6% of resident physicians are trained in rural areas, in Northeast states particularly, where there is the highest density of residents, the lowest proportion of practitioners are choosing to work in primary care.
An overall increase in primary care spending is also considered necessary by the report.
The American Academy of Family Physicians has been quick to recognize that the first report alone will not be able to make a significant impact in the coming year or two but by supplementing the report’s findings with necessary policies change can be brought with time.
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