Introducing Advanced Primary Care

In the last couple of years, we’ve tried to drive home a couple key points about the routine medical care of your employees:

First, even though annual “check-ups” may not be that important, steady access to a primary care provider is essential. Access to primary care increases the life expectancy of a community. Primary care visits are declining, being crowded out by visits to retail clinics, urgent care centers, emergency rooms, and specialist visits.

Second, primary care is the most cost-effective form of health care, and to avoid unnecessary costs, most of your care should be coordinated through a primary care provider. American adults who have a primary care physician may have healthcare costs as much one-third lower than the costs of their peers who lack a PCP. Almost two-thirds of Medicare claims for wasteful or unnecessary care are by physicians with no relationship to the patient’s primary care practitioner.

But it’s possible that even with those assertions we’re thinking too small. KBGH is a member of the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions (say that three times fast), and they have adopted the provocative stance that simple access to primary care isn’t enough. The Alliance has begun advocating for “Advanced Primary Care.”

If you’re a provider, you might cringe at the name. Isn’t the “advanced” part insulting to a seasoned, experienced, competent doctor who does “regular” primary care? Names are tricky. But the name isn’t meant to connote the achievement of a certain score on board exams or the possession of a special skill set. Instead, Advanced Primary Care, as defined by the National Alliance, describes a philosophy and commitment to seven key, sometimes overlapping, attributes in the clinic: 

1. Enhanced access. Many patients end up in the emergency department simply because they could not access their primary care practitioner during normal business hours or they got frustrated by the time it takes to schedule and complete a visit. Primary care practitioners who offer available appointments on nights or weekends can reduce emergency room utilization.

2. Increased time with patients. The average fee-for-service primary care physician carries a patient panel of roughly 2,200 patients. In models in which the physician or practice directly contracts with employers, this number may be more like 400-600 patients. This allows additional time with each patient to encourage better engagement, to better identify social determinants of health, and to relationship-build to ensure continuity of care over time.

3. Realigned payment methods. Much of the current fee-for-service model perversely incentivizes increased care or increased volume without increased quality of outcomes. Advanced primary care, which operates more frequently on a salaried or subscription model, seeks instead to incentivize patient activation, case and care coordination, accountability for health outcomes, and judicious use of downstream referrals.

4. Organizational and infrastructural “backbone” to support patient-centered leadership, additional training for staff when needed, and commitment to quality improvement over time. This may mean changes in the practice’s staffing and use of information technology.

5. Behavioral health integration in order to deliver “whole person health,” not just physical health. This can be in the form of a social worker, therapist, or psychologist on site or coordinated via telemedicine.

6. A disciplined focus on health improvement, not just reactive care, with a deep understanding of population risk factors and a strategy to focus resources within that population to where they will drive the greatest overall improvements. Advanced primary care seeks to anticipate problems like seasonal influenza, not just respond to crises that arise from those predictable problems.

7. A process of referral management to other providers or services, like specialist physicians, labs, radiology departments, and allied health, that explicitly seeks to maximize quality while moderating downstream cost.

The National Alliance has a good infographic on Advanced Primary Care below. If you’re interested in exploring direct contracting with primary care providers for your employee benefit package, please let us at KBGH know. We would love to help out.

As the Medical Director of the Kansas Business Group on Health I’m sometimes asked to weigh in on hot topics that might affect employers or employees. This is a reprint of a blog post from KBGH.

Transparency is Trust

As the Medical Director of the Kansas Business Group on Health I’m sometimes asked to weigh in on topics that might affect employers or employees. This is a reprint of a blog post from KBGH:

In 1963, Stanford economist Kenneth Arrow published the landmark paper “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care.” He argued presciently that health care was an unfair system in which to bargain due to “asymmetric information.” The doctors, hospitals, and nurses simply know more than the patients, and this imbalance in information keeps the patient from being able to comparison shop or argue for fairer prices. If a doctor tells you you need a stent in your heart, after all, don’t you need it?

Equip patients with information and they usually make the right choice

There is data to suggest that patients, when given the right information to work with in a digestible way, make responsible decisions in health care purchasing. My favorite study on the topic looked at parents of children with appendicitis. Parents were randomized to see one of two videos: one group of parents saw a video that simply went over the difference between old-fashioned “open” surgery to remove the appendix and newer laparoscopic surgery that uses small “keyhole” incisions to put a camera and small instruments into the abdomen to remove the diseased organ. The video seen by the other half of parents explained the differences in the surgeries but also explained the price difference between the techniques (laparoscopic surgery is more expensive). Both videos stated that patient outcomes are similar with either procedure.

The parents who saw the video with the charge estimate were 1.8 times as likely to choose the open procedure. In fact, the effect of simply stating the charges in the video reduced the average price of the surgery from $10,477 to $9,949, a difference of $528, since more parents chose the open procedure when presented with good data. And more than a quarter of the parents choosing the open procedure said cost was the primary factor in their decision-making! This point is worth restating: parents, when confronted with a surgical choice in an emergency situation that, if handled incorrectly, could harm their own child, still took cost into account in their decision-making.

Things we’d hoped would work… but didn’t.

Many hoped the internet would solve the knowledge gap in medicine and empower patients. After all, in the business of buying and selling cars, some argue that information asymmetry is long-gone. If I were to buy a new Chevy Bolt today, I would simply choose my desired features on Edmunds.com, print the price sheet, and offer to pay my dealer a price in the ballpark of what Edmunds suggested was fair. But in spite of efforts from companies like Castlight, CashMD, and others, we haven’t seen a big dent in healthcare costs due to transparency alone. Some of this is due to the fact that doctors themselves–outside of the radical transparency of many Direct Primary Care physicians–aren’t always privy to the price of tests, drugs, or even their own services. And even those DPC doctors can’t necessarily share other outcomes we’re interested in, like rates of screening for cancer and metabolic diseases, mortality rates, and other quality indicators.

So the government has tried to step in. The Trump administration released an executive order in fall of 2019 requiring that by 2021 all hospitals must publish their “standard charges” online in a machine-readable format so that other software can begin to compare prices. This is a good start, but it is unlikely to work. Those “standard charges” are, in most cases, “chargemaster” prices that have little bearing on reality. Medicare, for example, pays about 31% of the chargemaster price. Second, patients mostly care about out-of-pocket payments, not insurance payments. To have an idea of their own liability, patients need the “bundled price” for the entire episode, which chargemaster prices do not provide. Instead, the chargemaster prices are for individual charges for materials and procedures

What CAN we do?

But we can’t just throw our hands up in frustration. As employers we should control what we can control. We can control state and federal policy as voters, but our power may be better wielded locally. We’ve pointed out previously in this blog that a lack of transparency was one of the big drivers of health care costs. That transparency extends beyond the operating room, exam room, or pharmacy. It reaches into the relationship between you and your partners, such as your broker, your PBM, and medical providers you may directly contract with. A good first step, if you weren’t able to attend our recent webinar with Dave Chase of Health Rosetta, is to ask for those partners to disclose all their revenue streams. Their undisclosed revenue streams may surprise you. Once everyone’s revenue is transparent, we believe that partners can work together in a more trusting relationship, to the benefit of both parties.

Note: KBGH works with Team IBX to introduce transparency in the insurance RFP process, but Team IBX was not involved in the writing and did not influence this post.