Transforming Primary Care: Innovation, Teamwork, and Leadership for a Healthier Future (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: I think it's an incredibly exciting time for primary care. I've practiced for over 30 years, and I don't think there's ever been a time for me that's

Speaker 2: been as exciting as right now. Certainly in American society, health care is, I think, one of the biggest things that's on people's minds.

Speaker 1: Care in our country has become increasingly expensive. We need to be able to deliver higher quality care at lower cost.

Speaker 2: The key to setting that equation right is actually primary care. Every system that delivers high value care is based largely on primary care.

Speaker 1: The Center for Primary Care is focused on innovation in primary care education and practice.

Speaker 2: And there's just all kinds of opportunity for creativity, for really original, hopefully at times disruptive thinking.

Speaker 1: We recognize that in order to transform the way we do care, additional support is needed, both financial support and facilitation and coaching. Our signature program is what we call the Academic Innovation Collaborative.

Speaker 3: Our site is a community health center in Cambridge, which serves a very low-income and diverse population. And the primary obstacle for us in the trenches is we just don't have enough time with patients. So I think the biggest piece that I'm learning has to do with the power of the team.

Speaker 1: We're very excited about team-based care as a way to improve the quality of providers' work life. And it's not just for the physician, but it's really for every member of the team.

Speaker 3: We're involving our nurses and front desk people and medical assistants, nutritionists.

Speaker 4: One of our biggest challenges initially is to get out of the purely visit-based approach to taking care of patients. And the other members of the team can really make that happen in a way that the docs alone just can't.

Speaker 1: So it means that your primary care doctor, their officer, their team will be following you in a proactive way, will be reaching out to you to make sure that you're not smoking, that you're taking your medications, that your hypertension is optimally managed.

Speaker 2: Working in a community of like-minded people who are learning from each other has been really special.

Speaker 1: The Innovation Fellows Program is something that we started a year ago. And what we do is we support faculty for a portion of their time so that they can lead innovative projects within their practice.

Speaker 2: The Innovation Fellows are focused on some of our most complex challenges in primary care, including how we manage diabetes, depression, chronic pain and addiction, and some of our most medically and psychosocially complex patients.

Speaker 1: Students have been, in many, many ways, the lifeblood of the center.

Speaker 3: They'll bring fresh ideas to it and a new perspective that isn't clouded by experiences from the past.

Speaker 1: We really see them as our next generation of leaders that are going to transform primary care and health care even more generally. In order to support that, we're developing leadership curricula for both students as well as faculty. If you're interested in research or innovation or leadership, primary care is probably the place where you can have the highest impact for our generation of physicians.