Bringing It All Back Home

In the scope of history, medicine has a definite tendency towards cyclical trends through generations. Recently, I've been considering the moves to incentivize preventative medicine, as well as those to reduce admissions and lengths of hospital stay. These factors are driving health care out of the hospital, and into the home. But looking though the lens of the past – we've been there before.

For the overwhelming majority of American history, health care delivery was centered around the home. Only recently, with the rise of the hospital system, have we witnessed an explosion of inpatient care. Far from this, the only care done outside the house was in charitable centers for the destitute. Further, physicians rarely maintained private offices. Early American medicine was a diminutive practice, and professional physicians viewed as a whole, were considered inconsistent at best.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the center of health care delivery was definitively the home. It was considered a familial responsibility to care for the sick of the household, and it was often beyond thought to send an ill family member outside for care. There was great tradition in caring for one's own family and considerable comfort and dignity in dying in one's home. In rare or advanced circumstances, a doctor could be summoned to the house to offer guidance. But, by and large, patients remained in bed and the extent of care was entirely within the confines of the family house.

The rise of the professional hospital system and the association of physician licensing to health facilities did much to initiate the movement of medicine outside of the home. Increased urbanization and longer work hours also limited the ability for families to care for themselves. The final blow was cast by the rise of individual health insurance, and the co-committal necessity to seek professional care. By the 1930s and 1940s, the public perception had shifted and American expectations aligned with hospital and office-based care. Since that time, health care delivery has become overwhelmingly associated with these entities.

Modern medicine is now seeing a rejuvenation in health care in the home, and a movement away from the hospital and office. Equipping patients with home blood pressure cuffs, glucose monitors, and sensitive scales allow regular monitoring of health. Many large health systems have developed integrated patient tracking programs, in which these devices automatically transmit information into the system database for that patient. Red flags are recognized by the system, and a phone call to the patient allows immediate evaluation and intervention. Further, the rise of direct care physicians has seen a sharp return to “house calls”. In the near future, a continued increased emphasis on preventative care will keep patients out of waiting rooms and tele-medicine will allow many to confer with doctors from the comfort of own living rooms.

Looking at the cyclical nature of American health care, I am reminded of the importance of remembering our roots. With the current debates and projections in health reform, perhaps it would be prudent to more fully consider the past as a means of plotting the trajectory of the future?

Another thought, which may be somewhat tangential, is no less important for the future of family medicine. As we move into this increasing technological world of health care delivery, it becomes ever more paramount that we stick tightly to our foundations. We must be resolute in our commitment to our patients and present in our compassion. We must practice a delicate and humanistic bedside manner. For that is the one thing that computers and precision medicine can never replicate – a comforting hand, a warm heart, and the dedication and trust of a life-long family physician.

1. For an extensive and enjoyable review on this subject, I would encourage EVERY medical student to read Paul Starr's The Social Transformation of American Medicine. If we understand where we are coming from, we can better be prepared for where we are going.

2. Quality of care and patient satisfaction seem to be hot topics in medicine at present. Certainly, the importance of a bedside manner cannot be underestimated. However, I find it intriguing that we are still striving for perfection in this area in the 21st century. After all, the basics of bedside manner were outlined 2000 years ago in the works of Hippocrates. Nearly 400 years ago, Thomas Sydenham wrote extensively on the details and the art of patient care. Again, with the cyclical nature of health care – before so eagerly looking toward the future and waiting for new solutions to arise, perhaps we should more often delve into the past.

Does Building a Primary Care Workforce Start with Medical School Admissions Committees?

Between COGME’s 20^th report recommending expansion of the nation’s primary care workforce (see 1/28/11 post) and the health care rhetoric and legislation coming out of Washington over the past few years, it seems that those in health care industry and policy are in full agreement that a primary care shortage exists in the United States and that the number of primary care physicians we produce in the coming years will have a significant impact on both cost of and access to quality care.

But how do we as a nation produce more primary care physicians? And is setting a numerical goal (i.e. 40% of physicians will be primary care physicians by 2020) enough?

Assuming we can improve reimbursement for primary care physicians (both male and female – see 2/3/11 post on gender-based physician salary gaps) such that family medicine becomes a more desirable financial option for those students who see reimbursement as a barrier to a primary care career, we will still have to address the disparity in access to primary care that occurs between geographical boundaries in the U.S.

In 1970, the federal government created the National Health Service Corps (NHSC) in an attempt to combat the changes in access to care that had begun over the prior two decades as rural physicians retired or moved to cities, where medical practices offered higher salaries and job opportunities for spouses. With the passage of the act that created the NHSC (and its subsequent amendments), the government recognized that proportion of patients living in areas with a population to practitioner ratio of 2,000:1 as “underserved.” These geographical areas were termed Health Professional Service Areas, or HPSAs.

Currently, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) website states that

“As of September 30, 2009, there are 6,204 Primary Care HPSAs with 65 million people living in them. It would take 16,643 practitioners to meet their need for primary care providers.”

Although over the past two years President Obama has reversed a trend in dwindling HRSA funding and expanded HRSA health workforce programs (including doubling NHSC funding to $300 million in the fiscal year 2010 budget and increasing that number by an additional $27 million for 2011 along with increasing funding for community health centers), we have to realize that more federal funding alone isn’t the panacea for curing the problem of geographic health workforce disparities.

A study published in the November 2010 issue of the American Journal of Public Health analyzed interview responses from primary care physicians in Los Angeles County, California concerning their reasons for practicing in their particular geographic location¹. Only 24% (5 of 21) of interviewees practicing in underserved areas in the county chose their practice location because of loan repayment obligations, which seems to indicate that federal funding is a minor player in the eventual retainment of primary care physicians in such areas. Compare that to the 19% (4 of 21) of physicians in nonunderserved areas serving in their respective areas due to loan repayment obligations, and one starts to wonder whether loan repayment money really has an impact at all.

Digging deeper into the numbers of the study reveals that those physicians working in underserved areas were most likely to do so because of mission-based values (a “sense of responsibility or commitment to a particular community, a defined patient population, or a moral obligation”) and self-identity (including “language, personal, family, cultural, socioeconomic, and geographic backgrounds”). A 2003 study of a rural physician workforce in Florida provides similar insight, noting that physicians from rural backgrounds and physicians who were exposed to rural experiences in medical school and residency were more likely to practice in underserved rural areas². To further the connection between training and practice, a 2009 study in the Annals of Family Medicine looked at training residents in community health centers (CHCs) and found that family medicine residents who trained at CHCs were four times more likely than their colleagues to go on to practice at CHCs³.

In addition, among primary care specialties in the L.A. study, the vast majority of physicians practicing in underserved areas were family physicians, whereas internal medicine and family physicians shared an equal percentage of the total in the nonunderserved cohort.

So what does all this mean? It would appear that prior experience in an underserved community and a sense of responsibility to that community is truly the major motivator in where a primary care doc practices. It means that medical schools and residencies need to partner with CHCs to encourage graduates to work with the kinds of populations that frequent them. Even more importantly, it confirms what we should have known all along: the best medical school candidates are those who already enter with mission-based values and who self-identify with those communities that most require family physicians.

Easier said than done, but we can’t hope to rely on loan repayment opportunities and training alone to funnel more students into family medicine. Opportunities to train with an underserved population best stimulate those who already want to work in that setting. It’s up to medical school admissions committees to select medical students who fit that bill.

The Robert Graham Center (RGC), with private foundation money, is already producing objective data on how well medical schools and training centers are fulfilling their “social mission” (that is to say, how well they are meeting the health care needs of the public)⁴. The RGC uses geographical information systems mapping tools to display these results visually. The only limitation of this data is that it is elicited from the American Medical Association Physician Masterfile which, although fairly comprehensive, still is prone to a small amount of error.

Knowing that, I propose a more effective use of federal money to improve the primary care services in the United States: create a national database of registered physicians and their specialties and locations of practice; then, instead of tying the majority of a medical school’s funding to the amount of research it produces, tie a large portion to the percentage of each school’s graduates who end up working as primary care physicians in underserved communities.

It would be a carrot approach, much like President Obama’s “Race to the Top Fund” for improving primary school education, and perhaps it would create an incentive (to compete with incentives from research funding and alumni donations) for admissions committees to take a closer look at the values of their applicants.

References:

1. Odom Walker K, Ryan G, Ramey R, Nunez FL, Beltran R, Splawn RG, Brown AF. Recruiting and retaining primary care physicians in urban underserved communities: the importance of having a mission to serve. Am J Public Health. 2010 Nov;100(11):2168-75.
2. Brooks RG, Mardon R, Clawson A. The rural physician workforce in Florida: a survey of US- and foreign-born primary care physicians. J Rural Health. 2003 Fall;19(4):484-91.
3. Morris CG, Chen FM. Training Residents in Community Health Centers: Facilitators and Barriers. Annals of Family Medicine. 2009 7:488-494.
4. Bein, Barbara. Robert Graham Center to Study 'Social Mission' of Teaching Hospitals, Health Centers. AAFP News Now. 27 July 2010.