COVID-19 has thrown into high relief a fact that the healthcare industry has been avoiding for a while; that U.S. hospitals and care facilities are overburdened and lack resources. Primary care in the country has shown to be unreliable, with patients left waiting indefinitely in call queues, leading them to self-diagnose and seek alternative treatments.
Primary care should be a comprehensive first contact with a patient, the first stop of people who need serious medical attention. Unfortunately, the place meant to contain illness is becoming a barrier to health. Unbundling primary care—segmenting customers and services to make them more personalized—will make the entire system more responsive to crises.
Traditional primary care: no longer practical?
Normally, providers or clinics have three groups that handle primary care—pediatrics, family medicine, and general internal medicine. These three are responsible for an array of medical responsibilities, such as management of chronic conditions, disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment of acute illness, and patient education and counseling.
Patients being funneled through a catch-all category operates on the idea that doing so would direct more resources to the patients who are in most need. In reality, the broad responsibilities that primary care has makes it difficult to fulfill all their duties.
For instance, primary care physicians manage 52 percent of annual outpatient visits in the U.S., and more than five times the number of billing codes compared to specialists. In a country of more than 880 million patients per year, with 227.9 visits for every 100 patients, that makes up a staggering amount of work hours.
The rise of alternative care sites
To prevent a pandemic or even a regional outbreak from seizing the healthcare system like it has this year, decision-makers for the medical industry need to rethink how products and services are provided across various demographics. Offering one system for various needs is no longer working, and is demanding a lot from primary care physicians.
Unbundling primary care can be done by providing a limited scope of services through a large number of providers. Retail clinics, urgent care clinics, and virtual care providers make specific procedures or treatments accessible to people who will be otherwise caught in the long queues and endless waiting times at general hospitals.
Alternative sites like these can offer more personalized, better healthcare. For one, they decongest the demand for services in large hospitals. People who choose retail clinics are usually those who are young, healthy, or willing to pay out-of-pocket for convenience.
It also makes better sense to have facilities specific to patients with the same concerns. For example, women’s healthcare can be further split into clinics for urgent care, prevention and maintenance on the one hand, and condition-oriented or complex co-morbid care on the other.
Possibilities of digital primary care
Discrete systems for various demographics will let doctors have a better idea of the patient’s care journey, as well as benchmarks they should be meeting.
This might also mean phasing out the current care system, which relies on electronic health records, in favor of real-time data from remote monitoring devices and laboratory results.
Conclusion
A scientific mind requires a researcher to let go of beliefs or procedures that no longer serve their purpose. The COVID-19 crisis has shown that the bundled primary care system leaves much to be desired, and it should be re-examined and modified.
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