Implementing High-Quality Primary Care: Rebuilding the Foundation of Health Care

A health system based on high-quality primary care leads to better health outcomes and better health equity. No other part of the health system can say that. Yet primary care in the United States is chronically underfunded, inaccessible to many groups, and growing more fragile. A new consensus report released today by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine from its Committee on Implementing High-Quality Primary Care — which includes Milbank Memorial Fund President Christopher F. Koller — offers a plan to implement high-quality primary care for everyone in the United States.

The plan’s five objectives are:

1. Pay for primary care teams to care for people, not doctors to deliver services.
2. Ensure that high-quality primary care is available to every individual and family in every community.
3. Train primary care teams where people live and work.
4. Design information technology that serves the patient, family, and interprofessional care team.
5. Ensure that high-quality primary care is implemented in the United States.

The report, Implementing High-Quality Primary Care: Rebuilding the Foundation of Health Care, identifies 16 specific actions to be taken by the federal government, states, health plans, employers, clinicians, and patients to achieve these objectives.

Committee co-chairs Robert L. Phillips Jr. and Linda A. McCauley, as well as Koller, also published a JAMA Viewpoint today that summarizes the report findings and recommended actions. “The US should reaffirm its commitment to a strong foundation of high-quality primary care as a common good that is accessible to everyone, and should make implementation of high-quality primary care a priority for government and the private sector,” the authors say.