‘Better Health — Now’ campaign aims to transform primary care

Key takeaways:

• The Primary Care Collaborative’s “Better Health — Now” campaign aims to reform primary care by increasing investments in resources, breaking down social barriers and providing quality health care that matches patient payment.
• The current U.S. mental health and overdose crises trends demonstrate the need for more resources that would allow for behavioral health integration, experts said.

The Primary Care Collaborative has launched a campaign to help advance the field through payment reform and increased investment.

Leaders and advocates of the Primary Care Collaborative’s (PCC) “Better Health — Now” campaign spoke at the Primary Care Transformation Summit, detailing planned actions and lobbying.

Joining PCC President and CEO Ann Greiner, MCP, was National Partnership for Women & Families Vice President for Health Justice Sinsi Hernández-Cancio, JD, and ACP President Ryan D. Mire MD, FACP.

Greiner said the PCC launched the campaign after seeing how primary care had to use determination and resiliency to “reinvent itself” for patient needs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We have a great sense of urgency in changing the environment for primary care so it can address the inequities that have been laid bare by this pandemic,” she said.

Better Health — Now launched this past March, and now possesses 48 signatories.

As part of the campaign, the PCC outlined three steps that state and federal policymakers should consider to advance the field:

• invest health care resources into primary care to ensure more equitability, sustainability and community orientation;
• transition primary care payment into a prospective payment model to ensure practice care meets patients’ needs and costs; and
• reduce social and economic barriers to mental health to allow underinvested and underserved communities greater access to health care services.

According to the PCC, more financial investments are needed to enable behavioral health integration into primary care. This would allow primary care clinicians to better address crises like substance abuse and mental health. According to Mental Health America, 27 million (56%) U.S. adults with a mental illness go untreated.

“On average, the United States invests about 6% of health care dollars in primary care, and we have the worst outcome of our peer countries,” Mire said, adding that other countries “have at least doubled their amount of investments in primary care.”

The PCC plans to push the need to eliminate the parity between Medicare and Medicaid through a hybrid option within the Medicare Shared Savings Program that could result in a primary care field where patient payment equals superior and more personalized care, from “one-stop shopping” to whole-person care and care coordination, Greiner said.

While Medicaid has succeeded in aiding underserved communities, “physicians don’t have the same reimbursement as they do with commercial insurance or Medicare,” Mire said. “There’s a disparity right then and there,” he added.

The National Center for Primary Care and Morehouse School of Medicine recently teamed with the PCC for the Better Health — Now campaign “to put out a brief of how primary care can be leveraged to improve health equity,” Greiner said, marking an important step for removing economic barriers.

A patient’s ability to depend on a practice and health care system will be critical considerations for any reforms, Greiner said.

“We need to build trust. Many changes in health policy have unfortunately undermined the safety net or made things worse for vulnerable populations,” Greiner said. “We want to make sure the changes we promote do not do that.”

As a consumer organization and one of the campaign’s signatories, Hernández-Cancio said the National Partnership believes primary care is a foundation that will bring needed change within the health care of rural, urban and diverse communities, particularly those that have been marginalized.

“It addresses quality and where people fall through the cracks, which is a fragmentation of the health care system,” Hernández-Cancio said.

References:

• Adult Data 2022. https://www.mhanational.org/issues/2022/mental-health-america-adult-data. Accessed Aug. 25, 2022.
• ‘Better Health — Now’ aims to help patients benefit from more community-based primary care. https://www.pcpcc.org/2022/03/29/%E2%80%98better-health-%E2%80%94-now%E2%80%99-aims-help-patients-benefit-more-community-based-primary-care. Published Mar. 29, 2022. Accessed Aug. 25, 2022.
• Greiner A, et al. The Primary Care Collaborative’s Better Health – Now Campaign. Presented at: Primary Care Transformation Summit; July 25-29, 2022 (virtual meeting).