Grantees Drs. Bruce Leff and Christine Ritchie Discusses GeographiHome-Based Primary Care Providers
Two of the Foundation's grantees, Dr. Bruce Leff of Johns Hopkins University and Dr. Christine Ritchie of the University of California San Francisco, recently published a piece in Health Affairs on the geographic concentration of home-based primary care providers throughout the nation. Using data from the Medicare fee-for-service program, Drs. Leff and Ritchie found that a majority of Americans live more than 30 miles away from any of the 475 primary care providers who made 1,000 or more home visits in 2012.
"Growth of the aging US population will fuel the nation’s demand for home-based medical care. The full scope of needs of homebound frail Americans are not best served by the current fragmented model of health care, which results in large expenditures because of hospitalizations and visits to the emergency department. Patients who are frail, homebound, or both and who have multiple chronic conditions and functional limitations account for about half of the costliest 5 percent of patients," wrote the authors.
To read the full article, head over to Health Affairs.