Methodology

Advanced Primary Care

A better healthcare model for building stronger relationships, increasing engagement, lowering costs, and improving outcomes.

What is advanced
primary care?

Simply put, it’s what healthcare should be. Advanced primary care takes what you’ve come to expect from standard fee-for-service healthcare – the long waits, the frustratingly short appointments, the shuffle of specialist visits, the high costs and stress — and turns it upside down, creating a new model with aligned incentives that benefit patients, providers, communities, employers, and insurers while saving money.

Advanced primary care minimizes obstacles to health by emphasizing time-rich appointments, empathetic listening, and behavior change. The results are better outcomes, improved population health and satisfaction, and fewer claims.

How advanced primary care works

Delivering advanced primary care starts with understanding what’s important to people’s health and working backwards to build a model around it.

 

Accessibility to more providers, smart scheduling, low-to-no-cost visits, convenient locations, and no wait times

Time-rich appointments that allow people to be heard and providers to understand them beyond their symptoms

Primary care providers who have the time, support, and staff to provide most of a person’s care -- care that in today’s system is being outsourced to specialists

Care coordination to prevent gaps in communication and treatment when specialty care is appropriate, including follow-up and integration into the member’s care plan

Empathetic listening that goes beyond prescriptive medicine, building connections and understanding of a person’s whole health

An informatics platform that identifies health risk opportunities and provides actionable insight into utilization

Professional health coaches who use the transtheoretical change model to help patients improve their lifestyles and achieve life goals

Culture change is the result of people seeing their care team as an extension of their friends and family, and the powerful realization that they, themselves, are in control of their own health

Our patients love advanced primary care

“This was one of the best medical appointments I have ever had. Everyone from the receptionist to the doctor made me feel like their number one priority. They spent more time with me than I ever expected and showed an honest concern with everything about me and my health.”

VERA PATIENT, SEATTLE FIREFIGHTERS

Advanced Primary Care vs. Standard Primary Care

Aligned incentives propel optimized utilization, improved health, and lower healthcare costs.

TRADITIONAL CARE

The current standard of healthcare requires primary care providers to act as filters for specialists.

Production, Not Prevention
This fee-for-service model demands, among other things, seeing as many patients as possible, which seriously diminishes the time and attention they can spend with patients, and getting to know them beyond the symptoms.

Lack of Engagement
And because of the administrative burden placed on providers, it’s a challenge to be proactive, whether that means contacting a patient for follow up, researching new treatment options, or even building, much less managing, their patients’ care plans. To say nothing of delayed financial reimbursement in the third-party payer system.

ADVANCED PRIMARY CARE


Advanced primary care flips the current standard of healthcare, starting with what’s most important to patient health: time and understanding.

Time-Rich, Empathetic Care
Providers have the time they need to form trust with their patients. Empathetic listening helps them to understand not just their patients' physical health needs, but the mental, financial, and social determinants affecting them.

Better Insight for Whole Patient Health
By providing most of the care a patient needs -- including risk identification through informatics, extended care teams, and health coaching -- advanced primary care improves medical efficiency. It delivers aligned incentives that drive down costs through better health, like optimized utilization and quality of care over quantity of patients. 

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The Importance of Care Centers

Advanced primary care encompasses a whole network of services. Care centers are a vehicle for delivering those services, centralizing healthcare for patients. They receive the majority of consultation, treatment, and follow-up they need at one convenient location from one dedicated primary care team.

 

What are care centers?

Care centers act as a convenient and accessible hub for advanced primary care delivery, where patients can meet with a dedicated providers, allied medical staff, health coaches, and other team members who will take the time necessary to form strong relationships with them, understand their underlying issues, and provide the necessary treatment and guidance to help them achieve better health.

What are the advantages of a care center?

Navigating the current healthcare system is often needlessly complex. Rather than sending patients to several specialists spread out across various facilities, they’re able to access a wide range of services – including planned care, unplanned care, occupational health, disease management, and health coaching – from a single location.

What’s the effect of a care center on the patient experience?

Patients who have access to a wide network of care and a primary care team they can trust, not just for immediate treatment — but for information, guidance, and coaching —  will be more engaged in learning to make informed, proactive steps toward managing their own health. With a variety of convenient services at hand, they're also less likely to need expensive emergency or urgent care.

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Are you ready to create more value and improve health outcomes? Connect with us for an in-depth consultation.