Lessons from US and Global Scorecards to Help Improve How We Measure the Health of Primary Care
(February 2024)
In an article published in Health Affairs Forefront, MHQP’s CEO Barbra Rabson and her colleagues, Christopher Koller from the Milbank Memorial Fund, and Joseph Ross, Asaf Bitton and June-Ho Kim from Ariadne Labs, review the lessons we’ve learned from scorecards designed to measure and strengthen primary care in the U.S. and abroad.
“High-quality primary care is critical to promoting population health and advancing health equity, but the primary care system in the United States is in crisis with insufficient funding, growing workforce shortages, and declining access,” say the authors. “It is critical that primary care stakeholders to develop, compile, and disseminate a primary care scorecard for the United States that would pinpoint areas for improvement, advocate for essential policy changes, and establish heightened accountability to benefit patients and clinicians alike.”
“Much can be learned from experiences with primary care scorecards over the past decade, and the recent release of national and state-level scorecards in the U.S.,” the authors continue. “Lessons from prior efforts can inform future initiatives that leverage scorecards to reimagine and reinvigorate U.S. primary care.”
This article precedes the release of the 2nd US national primary care scorecard, which will be published by the Milbank Memorial Fund on February 28. In this report, Robert Graham Center researchers give five reasons why access to primary care is worsening. In addition, the Milbank Memorial Fund and the Physicians Foundation will be presenting a webinar on the same day at 12 p.m. ET. The panel discussion, moderated by Frances Sellers of the Washington Post, will review how the US and the states are performing on primary care workforce, financing, training, and research funding measures — and how challenges within each of these areas contribute to poor access to primary care.
Registration for this webinar is available here.
MHQP and the Center for Health Information and Analysis (CHIA) plan to release the 2nd Massachusetts Primary Care Dashboard this coming spring.