Movement on reform front in primary care

March saw many activities focused on evolving and implementing the recommendations from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) report - Implementing High-Quality Primary Care: Rebuilding the Foundation of Health Care. It is remarkable that nearly a year later, this report continues to have such strong salience in our community.?

For our part, the PCC was excited to launch a major, related public effort. On March 29, we introduced our Better Health – Nowcampaign to strengthen primary care in all communities through greater investment and better ways to pay for better health. The campaign will focus on moving the NASEM report’s payment recommendations from paper to policy and already has broad support among PCC members.

Before the launch, we initiated a series of educational webinars that relate to the campaign. In case you missed them, you can link to the recordings. Watch for announcements for future PCC webinars related to the campaign.

We are grateful to The Commonwealth Fund and the Samueli Foundation for their support of these PCC activities.

The week before our launch, NASEM hosted a webinar kicked off by Assistant Secretary of HHS Rachel L. Levine, MD, to introduce the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Initiative to Strengthen Primary Health Care (watch the recordings and get the meeting materials). This new initiative is a direct response to the findings and recommendations laid out in the NASEM report and is led by Judith Steinberg, MD, MPH. The PCC is eagerly awaiting her plan to be presented to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra for his review in June.

In the meantime, the Milbank Memorial Fund has continued its work developing a National Primary Care Implementation Scorecard that is intended to assess progress on implementing high-quality primary care and to create policymaker accountability for achieving the recommendations of the NASEM report. Milbank and The Physicians Foundation are partnering with the Robert Graham Center on developing the scorecard. The first report and data visualization will be published in January 2023.

Spring is a time of growth and renewal, and we hope that’s true for primary care. We hope all of these new efforts and energy directed at re-imaging primary care bear fruit!

Ann Greiner

President & CEO