New patient-centered vision emerging in U.S. primary care

“Primary care may just be the most exciting place to be in medicine in the near future,” HSPH Professor John McDonough writes in his latest Health Stew blog post, published September 12, 2012 on Boston.com. New models for structuring care that are currently gaining in popularity reimburse providers by the patient rather than the procedure, and allow for more time to focus on prevention. Three of McDonough’s former students, Jason C. Kroening-Roche and Branden W. Comfort, who both earned master’s degrees in public health this year, and Kathleen Barnes, currently a Harvard Medical School student, wrote a Perspective on the topic in the New England Journal of Medicine, published September 6, 2012.

In their view of primary care in the future, “No longer would the physician run from room to room, pushed by the clock and the paycheck. Reimbursed through global payments linking hospitals to primary care practices, the physician, too, would have a financial incentive to keep patients healthy and to prioritize services with that goal in mind.”