Last month CMS announced an "Accountable Health Communities" initiative:
The US health system is badly out of whack. 95% of the trillion dollars we spend on health care each year goes for acute medical treatment, but 60% or the preventable deaths are caused by "social" factors. In the brief appointments that are too characteristic of medical practice, it's difficult for physicians to learn about a patient's social circumstances. And I know from the brilliant and idealistic primary care residents I teach that they feel their training has not prepared them to know what to do in response to the stories they hear from their patients.
I believe the disconnect between what typical medical care involves and the existential circumstances of our patients' lives is a major contributor to the high rate of "burnout" and "demoralization" among physicians. When physicians and patients feel deeply connected, medical interventions are more effective and both parties experience intrinsic satisfaction. Sadly for all, this connection often does not occur.
Dr. Heidi Behforouz, a colleague at Harvard Medical School, has written usefully about "rethinking the social history." Here's her diagnosis of the problem young physicians like those I have the privilege of working with encounter:
When health organizations move from being strictly "medical" to becoming "health communities," we'll have created settings in which medical, nursing, and other health professional students can learn how to do what William Osler urged a century ago: "the good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease."
The Accountable Health Communities (AHC) model addresses a critical gap between clinical care and community services in the current health care delivery system by testing whether systematically identifying and addressing the health-related social needs of beneficiaries’ impacts total health care costs, improves health, and quality of care. In taking this approach, the Accountable Health Communities model supports the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Service’s (CMS) “better care, smarter spending, and healthier people” approach to improving health care delivery.I think the initiative is a very big deal!
The US health system is badly out of whack. 95% of the trillion dollars we spend on health care each year goes for acute medical treatment, but 60% or the preventable deaths are caused by "social" factors. In the brief appointments that are too characteristic of medical practice, it's difficult for physicians to learn about a patient's social circumstances. And I know from the brilliant and idealistic primary care residents I teach that they feel their training has not prepared them to know what to do in response to the stories they hear from their patients.
I believe the disconnect between what typical medical care involves and the existential circumstances of our patients' lives is a major contributor to the high rate of "burnout" and "demoralization" among physicians. When physicians and patients feel deeply connected, medical interventions are more effective and both parties experience intrinsic satisfaction. Sadly for all, this connection often does not occur.
Dr. Heidi Behforouz, a colleague at Harvard Medical School, has written usefully about "rethinking the social history." Here's her diagnosis of the problem young physicians like those I have the privilege of working with encounter:
Physicians often see patients with complex social situations as a burden — requiring extra work that is neither reimbursable nor central to our core clinical expertise. Unfortunately, we inculcate these attitudes in trainees, implicitly and explicitly, perhaps because of our discomfort with hearing difficult stories or our sense of powerlessness or incompetence in addressing these root problems. Whereas biologic pathology may present specific targets for intervention, social or structural pathology is difficult to treat.The CMS "Accountable Health Communities" initiative is designed to explore organizational models that foster a stronger connection between the "medical" and "social" aspects of our patients' lives. Strong links to community resources, new skills for understanding social contexts, and improved tools for recording social information in a useful form, will all be required.
When health organizations move from being strictly "medical" to becoming "health communities," we'll have created settings in which medical, nursing, and other health professional students can learn how to do what William Osler urged a century ago: "the good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease."
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