Family Physicians As Team Leaders: “Time” to Share the Care
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VOLUME 6: NO. 2, A59 APRIL 2009 SPECIAL TOPIC Family Physicians as Team Leaders: “Time” to Share the Care Kimberly S. H. Yarnall, MD, Truls Østbye, MD, PhD, Katrina M. Krause, MA, Kathryn I. Pollak, PhD, Margaret Gradison, MD, J. Lloyd Michener, MD Suggested citation for this article: Yarnall KSH, Østbye T, Several interventions to improve preventive service Krause KM, Pollak KI, Gradison M, Michener JL. Family delivery and chronic disease management have been physicians as team leaders: “time” to share the care. tested. For example, Put Prevention Into Practice was an Prev Chronic Dis 2009;6(2):A59. http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/ effort to reorganize the delivery of preventive services, but issues/2009/apr/08_0023.htm. Accessed [date]. evaluations of this program failed to show significant sus- tained increases in preventive service delivery (4). Efforts PEER REVIEWED to automate reminder systems and improve efficiency in both prevention and chronic disease management have yielded initial improvements in randomized trials (5), but Abstract the effectiveness of computerized prompts appears to drop rapidly in the 6 months after implementation (6). A major contributor to shortfalls in delivery of recom- mended health care services is lack of physician time. On The common denominator in the failure to deliver ser- the basis of recommendations from national clinical care vices is probably lack of physician time. Our previous anal- guidelines for preventive services and chronic disease yses have suggested that primary care physicians simply management, and including the time needed for acute do not have enough time to deliver all the preventive and concerns, sufficiently addressing the needs of a standard chronic disease services recommended in national clinical patient panel of 2,500 would require 21.7 hours per day. care guidelines (7,8). To better understand the problem The problem of insufficient time indicates that primary of insufficient time, we examine how family physicians care requires broad, fundamental changes. The creation of allocate their time in the office among the types of service primary care teams that include members such as physi- delivered (preventive, chronic care, or acute). We compare cian assistants, nurse practitioners, dietitians, health edu- these data with published estimates of the time needed cators, and lay coaches is important to meeting patients’ to adhere fully to recommendations for preventive ser- primary care needs. vice delivery and chronic disease management while still fulfilling existing acute care demands. We then discuss a delivery model for health service that has the potential to Introduction overcome the time demands on primary care clinicians. Only approximately half of eligible patients receive recommended preventive, chronic disease, and acute Analysis of Actual and Recommended Time care services (1). Inadequate office systems are often for Patient Care cited as limiting clinician efficiency and effectiveness (2). Physicians have reported barriers to delivering services Actual time distributions that include external regulations, reimbursement struc- tures, and lack of time (3). To determine the distribution of family physicians’ time spent providing care to patients, we analyzed data The opinions expressed by authors contributing to this journal do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Public Health Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the authors’ affiliated institutions. Use of trade names is for identification only and does not imply endorsement by any of the groups named above. www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2009/apr/08_0023.htm • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention VOLUME 6: NO. 2 APRIL 2009 from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey 10 common chronic diseases, and we allotted additional (NAMCS) for 2003 (9). The NAMCS is a national survey visits for uncontrolled or severe cases if recommended by of the provision of ambulatory medical care services, the guideline (8). The estimated times required to meet regardless of specialty, in the United States. The survey national guidelines also assumed a well-run, fully staffed is based on a sample of visits to nonfederally employed, practice with a functioning informatics system that pro- office-based physicians who are primarily engaged in vided patient information to the physician and staff. We direct patient care (9). did not consider in the calculations the amount of time spent on paperwork or contacting patients by telephone. The NAMCS provides information about each visit sam- To estimate the time required for acute care, we assumed pled that includes the specialty of the provider (eg, family it would remain the same as in current practice. medicine, pediatrics), what type of provider was seen (eg, physician, nurse), the type of visit (acute, preventive, or Results chronic care), and the length of the visit in minutes. We selected only visits to family medicine physicians for our Table 1 presents the actual distribution of family physi- analysis. cian time by type of visit: acute, chronic, or preventive. Almost half of visits are for acute problems, more than We identified the proportion of visits with family physi- one-third are for chronic disease, and approximately 15% cians that were for acute care, preventive care, and chronic are for preventive services. Acute visits require an average disease management (routine and acute flare-up). The of 17.3 minutes, less time than either preventive or chronic NAMCS also uses the visit category “Pre-/Post-surgery,” visits. After adjusting for the length of each type of visit, which makes up 1% of the visits; these were subsumed family physicians spend approximately 3.7 hours of their under acute care for this analysis. day in acute care (46%), 3.0 hours of their day in chronic disease care (38%), and 1.3 hours delivering preventive The average time in minutes spent with the physician services (16%). in each type of office visit was determined. On the basis of the proportions of the 3 types of visits and their respective Table 2 presents the number of hours per day required lengths, we calculated the proportion of time spent on each to comply fully with current guideline recommendations type of care. These adjusted proportions were then applied for preventive services (7) and for the 10 most common to the number of hours per week that family physicians chronic diseases (8). Time spent providing acute care is spend in direct patient care, 40.2 hours (10), to arrive added to complete the estimate of total time needed to at the average number of hours per day spent providing deliver all clinical care. Taken together, providing care acute, chronic, and preventive care. for prevention, chronic care, and acute care to an average patient panel would require 21.7 hours a day. Required time distribution Our earlier reports (7,8) used studies of national preven- A Service Delivery Model to Meet tive service and chronic disease management guidelines to Guidelines for Care estimate the total time required per year to deliver recom- mended care. The time was irrespective of the number or The time required to deliver recommended primary care length of visits or the number of diseases dealt with in a is almost 3 times what is available per physician. To meet visit. We used a theoretical patient panel of 2,500 (a typi- guidelines for chronic disease management and preven- cal panel size for family medicine [11]), with an age, sex, tion, physicians would need to work 22-hour days and and disease prevalence representative of the US popula- reorganize their practices so that they spent almost 50% tion. In the study on time for preventive services (7), we of their time in chronic disease management and a third used published and estimated times per service to deter- of their time in prevention. It is easy to see why there are mine how long it would take to provide all services recom- shortfalls in service delivery; both the time required and mended by the US Preventive Services Task Force. In the the focus on urgent health issues rather than long-term study on chronic disease care (8), we applied 10 minutes health concerns prevent primary care clinicians from per visit for the recommended number of yearly visits for delivering recommended care. The opinions expressed by authors contributing to this journal do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Public Health Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the authors’ affiliated institutions. Use of trade names is for identification only and does not imply endorsement by any of the groups named above. 2 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention • www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2009/apr/08_0023.htm VOLUME 6: NO. 2 APRIL 2009 The time calculations presented in this report assume chronic care will require an important change in physi- ideal office work flow and information transfer and do not cian mindset, a retooling of office staff and information account for time on the phone or doing paperwork. Efforts systems, and a change in reimbursement and insurer to streamline care through better office organization and incentives to providers and patients. Electronic sharing informatics may improve some other issues surrounding of information will be needed to manage the increasing service delivery but will not address the core problem of amounts of clinical data for each patient. Information inadequate time. It is unlikely that even the most orga- systems should focus on longitudinal chronic disease and nized office and most motivated staff can fulfill the care preventive care management, including systems to track recommendations for all patients. the care of patients with diseases and to prevent errors. During the past decade, national organizations (2), pro- Alternatives for solo physicians fessional associations (12,13), and health services research- ers (14) have described US primary care as a system in One current approach to care reduces the panel size for crisis that must be fundamentally reorganized.