Home -- The Robert Graham Center

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?

Director's Corner


Alabama Cooperative Extension field agents observing the cotton crop in Barbour County in 1926. Photo: Auburn University Libraries

Achieving the promise of the Patient Centered Medical Home will require a strategy for disseminating and implementing innovations and best practices. Geographically dispersed, small primary care practices need extension agents akin to those that transformed farming a century ago. Learn more:

Health Care Cooperative Extension Service

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

Primary Care Incentive Payments

The US Senate Finance Committee proposed incentive payments for primary care physicians who meet certain thresholds of "primary care-ness." The Graham Center analyzed how many physicians would meet those thresholds, and the potential impact on both physician revenue and Medicare costs. Read the white paper:

Effects of Proposed Primary Care Incentive Payments on Average Physician Medicare Revenue and Total Medicare Allowed Charges

THE ROBERT GRAHAM CENTER exists to...

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

The Center aims to achieve this mission 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.