"More Comprehensive Care Among Family Physicians is Associated with Lower Costs and Fewer Hospitalizations" this was the name of a study published in the May/June 2015 Annals of Family Medicine.
Who has the kind of time to offer comprehensive patient care these days? (Rhetorical Question)
The study concluded that "increasing family physician comprehensiveness of care, especially
as measured by claims measures, is associated with decreasing Medicare costs and hospitalizations. Payment and practice policies that enhance primary care comprehensiveness may help bend the cost curve.”
The problem faced by many DPC pioneers these days is that we have had difficulty doing this kind of data mining. Filing claims is not an activity most DPC practices even consider. Placing ghost claims in an EMR for tracking purposes is one option, but even this measure could theoretically decrease efficiency. When we actually find a way to aggregate quality data across DPC practices and present it in a meaningful way the debate about whether to convert a practice will be over.
