(1) The 2007 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Final Rule that increased compensation for cognitive (Evaluation and Management) services at a rate exceeding increases for procedural services resulted in modest increases in rural primary care physician income in a prototypical practice. (2) A prototypical cognitive primary care practice realized a higher percentage increase in income, but a protot...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) authorizes several changes to the Resource-Based Relative Value Scale (RBRVS) system that are designed to increase primary care physician personal income and reduce geographic variation in primary care payment. In this brief, the ACA-authorized primary care payment adjustments are modeled in a prototypical rural primary care practice to asses...

INTRODUCTION Many Medicare enrollees do not receive colorectal cancer tests at recommended intervals despite having Medicare screening coverage. Little is known about the physician visits of Medicare enrollees who are untested. Our study objective was to evaluate physician visits of enrollees who lack appropriate testing to identify opportunities to increase colorectal cancer testing. METHODS...

Cultural values and beliefs about the primary care physician bolster the myth of the lone physician: a competent professional who is esteemed by colleagues and patients for his or her willingness to sacrifice self, accept complete responsibility for care, maintain continuity and accessibility, and assume the role of lone decision maker in clinical care. Yet the reality of current primary care m...

BACKGROUND Two assumptions underpin the implementation of pay for performance in Medicare: that with the use of claims data, patients can be assigned to a physician or to a practice that will have primary responsibility for their care, and that a meaningful fraction of the care physicians deliver is for patients for whom they have primary responsibility. METHODS We analyzed Medicare claims fr...

background & purpose: since 2005, a reform known as rural insurance and family medicine scheme has introduced to primary health care network in iran in rural areas and small towns. the content of the reform implies a substantial change in those aspects of health centers that mainly could be categorized as structural quality. although, this is the requirement of all health care providers, they a...

From the earliest definitions of the term primary care to the most recent, all have stressed that primary care is predicated on a sustained relationship between patients and the clinicians who care for them. Primary care differentiates itself from other areas of medicine by attending to the whole person, in the context of the patient's personal and medical history and life circumstances, rather...