Reinventing the current process-driven approach to primary care is key to achieving better health outcomes at a lower cost, according to Kyna Fong, CEO and cofounder of Elation Health.
Ms. Fong said while healthcare leaders widely agree that primary care needs to play a more central role in U.S. healthcare, the current system is not built to support it.
"There has long been a sense that reinventing primary care is a key to fixing health care," she wrote Sept. 28 in Harvard Business Review. "This key hasn’t been working because we’ve been giving primary care doctors the wrong roles and measuring 'success' the wrong way."
Automating the care ultimately prevents physicians from building trust central to primary care, and ultimately encouraging healthier lifestyles for their patients, Ms. Fong said.
Ms. Fong said primary care needs dynamic support systems given it is not a subspeciality. The conversations with patients, longitudinal relationships between patient and physician and whole-person approaches are necessary.
Ms. Fong outlined three ways in which primary care can be reinvented:
- Designing a payment model that funds multidisciplinary care platforms while taking into account minimum process metrics requirements and patient satisfaction.
- Fixing electronic health record technology to make EHR purpose-built, which will remove barriers and create new capabilities while encouraging "best decision-making practices for patients, providers and payers."
- Expanding medical training outside of big hospitals to introduce new physicians to community-based primary care.