Hooked on Primary Care with Steven P. Furr, MD, FAAFP

I entered family medicine because I wanted to treat people rather than organ systems or diseases. I did not want to be defined by the procedures that I did but by the impact that I had on peoples’ lives.

I know them as a person, not just some things about them.

As we enter the new year, primary care physicians will have the opportunity to use the new add-on code G2211 for their Medicare patient visits. CMS established this code to acknowledge the longitudinal and continuous nature of the primary care patient-physician relationship. In their comments, CMS made it clear that it was the relationship that is the key to this code. It is also this relationship that is the key to primary care. It is what makes us unique and special.

Primary care is unique because our lives become intertwined with our patients. Maybe family medicine did not just get its name because we treat the whole family but because the patient becomes part of our family and we become part of theirs.

I have spent 39 years as a family physician in the small town of Jackson, Alabama. With everything that I know now, I would not hesitate to make the same decision again.

Steven P. Furr, MD, FAAFP
President, American Academy of Family Physicians