Home -- The Robert Graham Center

DIRECTOR'S CORNER

Family physicians appear to be gradually reducing the scope of care they provide, potentially threatening comprehensiveness, which is one of the key features of primary care. Medicare may fuel this trend. A recently published one-pager by Dr. Imam Xierali, other Graham Center staff, and collaborators at the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) uses ABFM data to document this decline. Another one-pager, led by Dr. Stephen Petterson and also written with ABFM leaders, provides evidence that the criteria for receiving Primary Care Incentive Payments — created by the Affordable Care Act — reward narrowed scope of practice and may adversely affect the very functions the incentives were meant to promote. An accompanying editorial by ABFM Board Chair Dr. Warren Newton in the current issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine deepens both discussion.

Income Inequality and Mortality

There is new evidence showing the link between income inequality and premature death. “Fair Society, Healthy Lives” reports that inequalities in England result in the loss, in total, of between 1.3 and 2.5 million extra years of life. “Avertable Deaths Associated with Household Income in Virginia,” shows that more than 24 percent of deaths in Virginia would not have occurred if the entire state had the same mortality rates as the affluent regions.

Access Reports

Learn about the challenges facing America's safety net in a series of reports by the Graham Center and the National Association of Community Health Centers:

Access Denied: A look at America's medically disenfranchised

Access Granted: The primary care payoff

Access Transformed: Building a primary care workforce for the 21st century

What influences student & resident choices?

There is increasing interest in assuring sustaining healing relationships through primary care. Yet, the U.S. does not actively influence the number, type, or geographic distribution of its physician workforce. Equitable access to health care is at risk without well-informed, evidence-based policies and incentives.

Specialty and geographic distribution of the physician workforce: What influences medical student and resident choices?

HealthLandscape: Version 3 Beta

An overdue update to HealthLandscape, our successful online Geographic Information System for health and community data, is underway. Among its many new features are immediate access to interactive mapping with fewer clicks, a modular structure for more efficient navigation, rapid visualization of population data that influences health (Quick Maps), and the ability to quickly drag and drop your datasets into our mapper (Quick Geocodes) for instant viewing. Preview beta.healthlandscape.org

Health Professional Shortage Area Mapper

Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs) are counties or portions of counties in the United States that have the lowest ratio of physicians to population. Learn more about primary care HPSAs in your area, and determine whether your practice might be eligible for bonus payments or other policy incentives based on location in a HPSA using our new tool:

Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA) Mapper

THE ROBERT GRAHAM CENTER exists to...

Improve individual and population health by enhancing the delivery of primary care.

The Center aims to achieve this vision through the generation or synthesis of evidence that brings a family medicine and primary care perspective to health policy deliberations from the local to international levels.

themes

Guiding the work of the Robert Graham Center

The Value of Primary Care

Health Access and Equity

Delivery and Scope of the Medical Home

Healthcare Quality and Safety