No matter how large or small your professional network, it's time to improve communications with the Primary Care Physicians in your community. Why? For years, healthcare in the USA has been specialty-centric. That is, in the M.D. world, specialties have made a lot more money than primary care. Healthcare Reform is changing that balance of power ... and payment.
Perhaps you've already read our comments about the Comprehensive Primary Care Initiative, even noticed or attended meetings in your state or city. The bottom line is that PCPs are being heavily incented to take on care coordination and to develop their practices as medical homes or medical communities. Given that care coordinators will take over the total care of the patient, we need to understand that PCPs are being placed at the power core of reformed healthcare. Not only will they coordinate every aspect of patient care, they will assemble the care team. Primary Care Physicians will play a key role in choosing the specialty providers who are able and available locally to most efficiently get the job done. Those team doctors (specialists) will need to be both available and valuable. So, when it comes to the eye care needs of the patient, will the PCP's eye care provider of choice be you?
We'd like to suggest that, more often than not, the Eye Care Practioner (ECP) of choice will be someone within the PCP's network, such as employee of the local hospital where the primary care physician already has admitting privileges and working relationships. Why? Expediency.
If that seems discouraging, it's probably time to think hard about being an independent eye care provider. No, this is not simply the same old same old. It's not the way it's always been. In years gone by when patients chose you based on your local reputation, there was no highly incented and highly paid care coordinator in the local doctor's office taking over the scheduling of their eye care visits.
The new realities of health care reform call for a proactive stance. YOU must step up and be counted. As we've seen in the last six posts, you have to be in the EHR game, you have to be ready for communications, you have to offer your value-add services to the local PCPs with whom you want to work.
We'll alert you, prod you, raise the red flag, advise and help you. In the end, you have to get busy at the grass-roots level and make things happen.
Alistair Jackson, M.Ed.
Jim Grue, O.D.
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