Our country is in the grips of a nationwide shortage of primary care physicians (PCPs) as pressures on our medical community caused by burnout, administrative burdens and broken payment systems continue to erode their capability and willingness to navigate a healthcare system in crisis. What’s more is that pharmacy retail giants like Optum, Walgreens and CVS are acquiring PCP practices without the slightest idea of how to effectively manage a successful business on the community level, resulting in nationwide closures.
As part of a cost savings measure after “suffering” a softer-than-expected quarter, Walgreens decided to close 60 underperforming Village MD clinics and exit five markets. While this may increase profitability for Walgreens, it will offer little comfort to the thousands of people who frequented these locations and relied on these physicians for care.
Primary care docs squeezed
Primary care has a number of pressing issues that need to be addressed head-on. In addition to the day-to-day stresses of the job and the increasingly complicated and convoluted nature of our current healthcare system, healthcare has a delivery problem. With clinics and facilities closing all over the country and hospitals operating at capacity on shoestring budgets, what few physicians remain find themselves overwhelmed with patients.
Providing care then becomes a numbers game. How many patients can I see every hour? How do I hit that quota? At what point does the number of patients seen cause the quality of care to suffer? Doctors did not get into medicine just to reduce patients to numbers. Healthcare was meant to be personalized and trusted. The purpose of a primary care physician is not to churn and burn but to cultivate a relationship with individuals in their community and make them feel as if their treatment and care are of utmost importance. This becomes difficult — if not impossible — to achieve with less and less time available to spend with each individual patient.
Solutions in value-based, home-based care
This is where value-based and home-based care comes in. By providing these services directly to patients in their homes, medical facilities and physicians can offer an ease of care that is simply not possible in our current healthcare climate. It helps to transform a patient’s relationship with healthcare and provides an avenue to higher-quality treatment and better outcomes. PCPs also gain a wealth of new knowledge about their patients and their quality of life.
As hospitals and medical facilities expand available services outside of their walls and into the community, home care providers are able to deliver higher-acuity care by leveraging the latest advancements in digital health technologies. Vitals can be tracked and monitored remotely and offer doctors the actionable insight they need into their patients’ health to develop treatment and medication plans. Then these medication schedules can be automated, allowing for the direct delivery of vital prescriptions directly to patients’ homes.
PCP, payer buy-in
While the healthcare of patients can be dramatically improved by extending home-based care services, they ultimately need the large-scale adoption of this system by PCPs and payers in order to realize the full potential that these technologies and services hold for the healthcare system. This model is most successful when care is provided in an interdisciplinary approach driven by primary care physicians.
This means home care agencies, hospitals, health tech companies, nurses, physical therapists and doctors alike need to be pushing these goals forward together in order to work at the top of their licenses and provide the sort of relief that the American healthcare system needs in order to elevate the quality of care that is available to people all over the country. When PCPs fully buy into home-based care and payrs fully respect the abilities of PCPs, we will see a reduction in rehospitalizations, an improvement in the comfort and convenience of care, and an optimization of the way our healthcare system operates.
As home-based care models are leveraged, healthcare will become less costly, more efficient and easier to access, which should be the ultimate goal of all providers. The giant pharmacy retailers should take notice before they put our network of PCPs in further jeopardy with their cost-cutting measures. We do not need to be shuttering clinics; and we need to be mobilizing them and getting them back out in front of the patients that need them most. We need to start thinking of PCPs less as a line item on a corporate budget and more as a vital resource in our efforts to revolutionize the way effective healthcare is delivered.
Jackleen Samuel is CEO and founder of Resilient Healthcare.
