Dear Mr. Slavitt, Please Come Visit My Office.

On July 7, 2016 Andy Slavitt informed us he wants to focus on primary care.  Below, I have chosen three points to help him with his task:  1. Overwhelming EHR requirements, 2. Defining value based care and, 3. A Solution for a Hurdle of the Care Coordination Model. 

Andy, if you want to fix primary care you must do some field research.  Come spend one day, or even a week at my office or another small primary care physicians’ office.  You need to see what we do on a daily basis and actually understand the view from a small practice perspective. This knowledge deficit is at the core of CMS's problem.  You cannot repair what you do not comprehend. 

Once you understand what we are capable of doing, how we do it, and how it actually SAVES money in the long run, while still providing high quality, then you are ready to tackle Focusing on Primary Care for Better Health.  The bottom line:  you must pay us more for what we are doing if you want to increase our overhead expenses.  Tasking us with additional administrative burden in order to earn extra money is not actually paying us any more for our work.  We would be working harder, not smarter.  Do you understand that?

First and foremost, the largest stumbling block for reducing expenditures of a small practice is addressing the certified EHR. Why do you need all this data?  Your days at McKinsey & Company have hooked you on its necessity to make management decisions, but your background in healthcare insurance and expenses is a far cry from the provision of primary health care or value-based care. 

The EHR mandate has damaged our profession as a whole.  It has been destructive to the physician-patient relationship as well. Technology has not improved safety, efficiency, or patient satisfaction and has only served to increase physician dissatisfaction.  Physicians are overwhelmed, hopeless, and trying to get out of the practice of medicine altogether.  You do not belong between me (the physician) and my patient – move out of the way.  Please.

If you want me to collect mountains of data, then prove it actually increases quality, reduces cost, and decreases our workload before I get on board.  There is very little margin to work with in my office, and if I make a wrong decision, my practice (and many others) will be dead in the water.   Find technology that is useful to both physician and patient while being affordable at the same time.  Stop adding complicated algorithms and programs to increase reimbursement while expanding our administrative burdens.  You will decimate everything decent about practicing medicine.

Second, value will materialize if you pay us more for what we do.  Higher reimbursement allows us to slow down and talk longer with each individual patient.  Make our lifestyle something to which others want to aspire and you will find more primary care physicians wanting to work in smaller areas.  Do not make us depend on a family inheritance or the lottery to prevent bankruptcy.  Primary care physicians, actually ALL physicians, deserve better. 

Have you not realized small practices provide urgent and emergency care, acute and chronic care, plus everything in between?  Care coordination, we already do it!  Winging it when there is NO specialist to refer to at all, we already do! It is value, pure and simple.  You cannot get anything more out of us.  There is nothing more to give.  If primary care is rendered obsolete because we could not keep up with your overwhelming demands, access will be in jeopardy.  Access will be worse than it is right now.  What will you do then?

As to your Collaborative Care Model, supporting mental and behavioral health through a team-based, coordinated system involving a psychiatric consultant, behavioral health manager, and the primary care physician sounds like a dream come true.  My county with a population of 260,000 has NO psychiatrist.  Not one.  Many states all over are experiencing the same provider shortages.  Can you grow psychiatrists somewhere at an accelerated rate, like that clone army in Star Wars, and drop them randomly by plane throughout the United States?  That would be a good start.  They could be raised to believe indentured servitude is their destiny.  I think it could work if you put that on your task list. 

CMS employees have not spent one day inside a small primary care practice.  It is necessary at this point in time that they do.  You talk about encouraging innovations to connect people with primary care.  Here is the thing Andy, primary care physicians do not need innovations to connect people.  We use phones, interact face-to-face with our patients, and chart to document the entire process.  If we were not good at connecting with people, we would not be successful primary care physicians.   

There is a lot of talking as a primary care physician.  It is difficult to quantify the value of face-to-face interaction but it is a crucial part of health care.  If you are feeling socially awkward and experiencing difficulty connecting to people, again, please come visit me in my office.  I will rid you of your communication problems, pronto.  At the very least, please spend some time with one primary care physician in a small community.  It will show you all that can be good with health care.  It will also open your eyes to what you are about to destroy.