We’ve figured out how to change the US healthcare system!

Introducing the FMEC Healthcare Innovators Network
www.fmec.net

Overview:

Primary Care Driven Solutions are one of the best kept secrets in the US health care system. Why are primary care driven solutions so important? When primary care innovators tackle a problem they see the big picture and focus on the needs of patients and their families. Primary care driven solutions improve access to care, reduce wasteful and unnecessary care, reduce the overall cost of care and improve patient outcomes and satisfaction. Primary care driven solutions also improve the connections between primary, sub-specialty care and community-based organizations.

Primary care solutions also address the social determinants of health and focus on how to partner with local stakeholders and advocacy organizations that care about improving the health of the population. Primary care driven solutions have been ignored in the past. For the good of our communities, it’s time to increase awareness of these approaches to health system improvement.

The Innovator’s Network provides a medium for innovators to showcase their work and receive useful feedback.  It also provides a place for employers, union leaders, hospital administrators, investors and others looking for strategies to improve care delivery while controlling/reducing the cost of health services.

History:

Since 2008, the FMEC has sponsored the Health Care Innovators Network, a meeting that showcases the success of Family Physicians, General Internists and others who are changing the care delivery systems in their respective communities. We spend the year searching for innovators who are developing new strategies, products and services. They have found a way to care for their patients/communities that improves health while reducing the cost of care. Most people when they think of primary care, think about a doc seeing a patient in a practice. That is not the way that the innovators think. They think about the needs of a community/population and they design services that improve health. 

That’s where the FMEC comes in… The FMEC is the convener and incubator that showcases their work and helps them to attract supporters and partners. We’ve developed a cadre of innovators and interested health system leaders who appreciate the value of this approach. Now it’s time to expand the reach and impact of the Innovators Network.  

Examples of Innovators:

We found Jeffrey Brenner, MD (aka “the hotspotter”) in 2009 while he was early in his work as an innovator in Camden NJ. He had developed a strategy to identify and serve the “super-utilizers” in his community. This was one year before Atul Gawande, MD made him famous through an article in the New Yorker magazine and four years before the MacArthur Foundation honored Dr. Brenner with a “genius award”.

Jeffrey Brenner, MD and the FMEC created a Super Utilizer Learning Community that has grown to include eight Family Medicine Residency programs. Five of these programs have partnered in central PA to create a multi-community super utilizer project that has drawn the attention of the Pennsylvania Department of Health and a major philanthropic organization. This work is redesigning the care delivery process in central PA. 

We found the Direct Primary Care innovators in 2008. The FMEC served as “first follower” and organized two Direct Primary Care National Summits (2013, 2014). The Summits attracted the attention of the American Academy of Family Physicians that endorsed the DPC model in their strategic report “Family Medicine for America’s Health”. The DPC business model is now the fastest growing innovation in the primary care sector.