IMPACT OF PRIMARY CARE TRANSFORMATION IN PRACTICE: A POLICY ANALYSIS OF STATE INNOVATION MODELS

Daniel RichPrimary care physicians face challenges with health care delivery, coordination, and cost. These challenges translate into barriers to the access of quality care. For these challenges to be overcome, the current U.S. health care system requires innovative redesign with a new, comprehensive foundation to establish a capable primary care delivery model. However, this type of innovative redesign and transformation of the U.S. health system must be able to meet the needs of an everchanging patient population and emerging community needs of a longer and sicker living population faced with more chronic health conditions that require team-based care coordination and care management. This paper will focus on analyzing several policy alternatives that aim to enable primary care transformation by evaluating the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of these proposed models of health care payment and delivery. Ultimately, the purpose of this paper is to make policy recommendations to relevant stakeholders regarding how to address this policy problem by using these state models of innovative delivery and payment systems as a framework. By analyzing the current health care reforms and two state innovation models, it was determined that although there is no single perfect fit between any of the three policies analyzed, aspects of each alternative that addressed rural health care redesign, health information access, and value-based payment systems will help to improve the access to, engagement with, and quality of health care for all Americans.Public Polic