Public Health

 POV: Massachusetts Can Finally Measure the Health of Primary Care

 “We may be spiraling toward the grim portrayal of a healthcare system lacking high-quality primary care”

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), a nationally renowned institution of science, recently asserted that “primary care is a common good” and went on to depict what the United States would look like if people no longer had access to high-quality primary care. In this dismal picture, “minor health problems can spiral into chronic disease, chronic disease management becomes difficult and uncoordinated, visits to emergency departments increase, preventive care lags, and health care spending soars to unsustainable levels.”

Perhaps the NASEM assertion that primary care is the only specialty that improves life expectancy and reduces health inequities is not surprising to many. What is surprising, however, is how few people are paying attention to how ill primary care has become and how we may be spiraling toward the grim portrayal of a healthcare system lacking high-quality primary care.

While patients and those of us on the front lines have many ideas of how local and federal investments must shift to improve primary care delivery, the traditional measures to assess the strength of primary care are outcomes on patients’ health metrics. Measuring how well primary care is controlling a patient’s diabetes, high blood pressure, or depression is indeed critical, but it’s only one side of the equation. In order for patients, providers, policymakers, and leaders to more fully understand how to move primary care forward, we also need the tools to assess and track the health of the very entities that deliver primary care services.

Massachusetts Health Quality Partners, a nonprofit organization originally founded to measure and publicly report comparable hospital quality information, has been closely tracking the patient experience and clinical performance of primary care practices in Massachusetts since 2006. Primary care’s fragility was apparent even before COVID-19’s devastating impact. Such practices are increasingly asked to accommodate increased patient volume, respond to more patient communications through patient portals, succeed in a greater number of health quality metrics, meet new demands of monitoring and addressing social and behavioral health needs of patients, and competently care for patients with extremely complex care needs. All of this while primary care continues to receive the same financial support and simultaneously faces emerging competition from concierge practices and corporations, such as Amazon and CVS, which offer patients an off-ramp from traditional primary care.

Compelled to highlight the instability of our primary care system, Massachusetts Health Quality Partners (MHQP) set up a series of meetings with primary care clinicians, patients, and community and organizational leaders and solicited hundreds of ideas about how we might measure the health of the primary care system. During this time, the Center for Health Information and Analysis (CHIA), an independent state agency, began to track primary care spending in response to a legislative proposal filed by then-Governor Charlie Baker to increase investments in primary care and behavioral health. Asking some of the same questions, MHQP and CHIA became partners in this work and developed a first-in-the-nation dashboard, recently released, that will measure and monitor the health of the primary care system in Massachusetts.

The dashboard tracks metrics from multiple publicly available sources in four key dimensions of primary care, with examples below:

Over the past 15 years, MHQP’s statewide measurement efforts have highlighted how well primary care practices in Massachusetts have managed patients’ chronic diseases and provided preventive care services. Yet, the dashboard is already showing us that performance on achieving health metrics is trending down, with consistent lack of financial investments in primary care, diminishing primary care capacity, and increased equity gaps.

As a public good, primary care deserves our collective attention—however, this requires a foundational understanding of its weaknesses. To effectively advocate for primary care, healthcare leaders, policymakers, and patients need accountability so that advocacy is based on evidence. Dashboards such as the one codeveloped by MHQP and CHIA will shed a light on how our system is doing and provide the necessary baseline data to monitor progress. While this dashboard will continue to evolve over time, it provides an important accountability tool that can be used to improve and sustain our primary care system as a truly valued resource for generations to come.

Katherine Gergen Barnett, vice chair of primary care innovation and transformation in the Family Medicine department at Boston Medical Center and clinical associate professor of family medicine at the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, can be reached at kagergen@bu.edu. Barbra G. Rabson, president and CEO of Massachusetts Health Quality Partners, can be reached at info@MHQP.org. This column originally appeared in the Boston Globe.

“POV” is an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact John O’Rourke at orourkej@bu.edu. BU Today reserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.