Fee-for-Service (FFS) medicine discourages quality primary care.

Incentivizing quick visits, not reimbursing asynchronous communication, and maintaining a narrow focus on acute illnesses, FFS favors quick care and penalizes meaningful time spent with patients.

Employers need help if they wants to lower their healthcare costs.

From proactive benefits advisors to knowledge on how not to be victims of predatory pricing, employers are footing the bill for America’s outrageous healthcare costs.

It’s time for primary care providers to take on risk.

Whether risk is in the form of Value-Based Care contracts or Direct Primary Care combined with Healthshares, quality preventative medicine needs to be rewarded if healthcare costs are going to come down.

Healthcare data needs to be portable.

Put another way, lack of data portability hurts patients.

Effective primary care involves leveraging caregivers to move the clinical needle.

Changing habits is hard. Following up on healthy diet choices, exercise reminders and improved lifestyle habits requires persistence and someone “on the inside”. Leveraging caregivers and loved ones is essential to moving the clinical needle.

The best and brightest med students need to start picking primary care.

The burden of paperwork and lower compensation for PCP’s often steers the most talented medical students toward ROAD specialties. Better physicians will lead to better care and more primary care innovation.

Current DPC physicians are leading the way in primary care innovation.

Whether through employer partnerships or just adopting innovating new tech (Communication tools or AI Scribes) the coolest things in primary care are being adopted by DPC providers first.

Someone needs to fill gaps of care between visits.

Conversations about your health shouldn’t be confined to <15 min semi-annual PCP visits. (If you are even lucky enough to have a good PCP) Primary care should include daily or weekly touch points. You can achieve this through digital tools to extend the care between visits.

Prevent doctors from saying the same thing over again.

A PCP will have around 100,000 patient visits in their careers. There’s no way HPI gathering and patient counseling for patient #100,000 will be as in depth as for patient #1. Help doctors take comprehensive HPIs and provide backup for patient counseling.

COVID-19 made clinicians think twice about in-person visits.

Nobody thought about aerosolized viral particles in the exam room prior to Covid. Keeping providers safe and healthy is now a priority.

For virtual primary care to thrive, it needs reliable point of care data.

Virtual care needs reliable vital signs, physical exam findings, point-of-care lab values, caregiver insights, and other verifiable data to be effective.

Virtual Primary Care needs local flair.

Successful virtual primary care hinges on possessing local knowledge—understanding where and to whom to direct patients for their care. A clinician without local insight operates with a significant disadvantage.