The Enigmatic History Of The Primary Care Medicine In 2022
Failure Of Primary Care Medicine To Meet Bureaucrats Scope Creeping Expectations Seems To Surface By The Day
Illumination publication initially publicized this article on Medium!
Riddling of the healthcare system by bureaucracy is not a novel phenomenon. From the spectrum of administrative expropriation of patient care, the concept of primary care solo reaches back almost one hundred years.
The Barefoot Doctors of old Communist China during the 1930s is as far as we can track back the origin Of primary care medicine. That is when Chinese government authorities trained rice farmers to provide limited healthcare services to rural communities.
Today, the contemporary derivative of Barefoot doctor's concept of scope creep is wildly prevalent under the new moniker of primary care.
Whether we call it primary care or village healers, both share one fact: both define the epitome of bureaucratically driven scope creeps under the society's best interest rationale.
Let's consider patient care or any individual assignments in the care process of every patient. In that case, the scope creep depicts all the necessary tasks required in respect of that assignment to qualify for maximal allocated payment or completion of that care stage.
For instance, traditionally, under the fee-for-service physician reimbursement model, visiting a patient for diabetic care would be sufficient to qualify for allocated insurance payment. However, today that is becoming a thing of the past.
Today, amid the introduction of value-based reimbursement, physicians under the so-called primary care model address information and data like social determinants of health using Electronic Health Records (EHR) Systems that lack user-friendliness.
When scope creep happens, patient care will suffer, overhead costs will rise, and the quality of care will plunge. And, Ironically, physicians' payments not only will not increase but often suffer penalties for not complying with the scope of work.
When this happens, the project risks being completed late, being over budget, and needing more quality. In this guide, we look at scope creep, some examples, how to prevent it from happening, and how to fix it if it has already gotten out of hand.
Primary Care And The Flop Of Scope Creep
Those familiar with scope creep also comprehend that expanding the scope of work without allocating reasonable time and resources can be highly counterproductive.
Since the evolution of the primary care discipline, adding administrative tasks to the selected general practice physician's to-do list has gradually crept into the scope of work for them.
Indiscriminate scope creeps brought up on physicians by administrations are not unique to the United States. Family practice physicians, pediatricians, and internists in other countries also experience pressure.
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Primary care scope creeps utterly fails physicians, as the system expects them to do more without adjusting time and reimbursement. Furthermore, the shift from fee-for-service to value-based payment schemes has made physicians feel undervalued and burdened to burnout.
According to multiple sources, those doctors designated as primary care physicians titles are already leaving medical practice or, at the very least, shifting to a part-time position.
Without a doubt, the healthcare system is failing and dragging down the physicians, causing suffering to them and their patients.
According to some, primary care concepts are dying away!
At the same time, fewer family physicians are available to provide services to many communities in countries like Canada, says the author of a report published in KevinMD publication.
According to other studies, COVID-19 put primary care to the test during the last couple of years, thus revealing a multitude of challenges. Millions of Canadians are feeling the ripple effect of the pandemic as they are still unable to access primary care services.
So, that was done, and almost a decade later, physicians are still overwhelmed, and patients are frustrated without quality care.
There is overwhelming evidence in support of primary care scope creep overhaul failure. Still, many bureaucrats need help to face the certainty as they are still unyielding by claiming a shortage of primary care physicians.
Ironically, despite that claim, some organizations, like American Medical Association (AMA), have dared to lobby for limiting medical school admissions and even shut down some medical schools.
Lessons To Be Learnt
Even as some bureaucrats may portray, primary care medicine is NOT a medical specialty. It is a scope creep instrument designed to bureaucratically expand the scope of work and responsibilities without balancing it with reasonable time and restitution.
Primary care is the contemporary means of toiling physicians via scope creeping. That includes introducing nonphysicians into the discipline under the supervision of physicians, thus adding more medicolegal and supervisory responsibilities to their already hefty workload.
Primary care is a failure, not merely because of a physician shortage. It is failing due to its undueness to its core nature. That is, the monopoly of tasks riddling the medical profession through scope creep and unjust control of physician reimbursement noose in the hands of corporations.
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