Here's Proof of Family Medicine's Value

Research at Your Fingertips

By Jane Stoever
12/12/2006

Thanks to an innovative offering from the Academy, it just got easier to make the case for the value of family medicine and primary care. A new AAFP online resource, Value of Family Medicine, provides links to abstracts and sometimes the full text of articles on the contributions of family medicine and primary care to patients' health and health care systems.

The new resource features a 20-item list, "Most Commonly Cited Articles," and gives information on more than 100 articles in the "Value of Family Medicine Bibliography." Almost all of the citations link to abstracts on PubMed, the National Library of Medicine's search service; most of the "top 20" link through PubMed to the full text, which may be free or available by subscription.

The body of medical literature on the importance of primary care has been growing for years, and to assist members, the Academy recently reviewed the literature and posted links to key articles, says AAFP EVP Douglas Henley, M.D. "The Academy gets requests for these articles frequently. Now family physicians can obtain the articles more easily for their advocacy efforts in the public and private sectors."

Family physicians also may tap the articles to help patients see the importance of family medicine, says Robert Phillips, M.D., M.S.P.H., director of AAFP's Robert Graham Center in Washington. "Family physicians are often embattled, beaten on, demoralized," says Phillips. "These articles tell family physicians loud and clear, 'Here is your contribution to the public's health, to good stewardship of the public's money in terms of overall health care spending.'"

Family physicians can use what they learn from the articles to tell patients why they shouldn't "jump ship" when their insurance coverage changes, says Phillips. He lets patients know, he says, that scientific evidence upholds the value of the patient-physician relationship to a patient's long-term health -- there are things the family physician knows about a family's health that are gleaned only over time.

"Also, we're all embroiled in local battles for our residency programs, for care of our patients in hospitals, for fair pay for the work we do," says Phillips. "These articles can help us in those battles."

The top 20 articles include the following titles and sources:

"Receipt of Preventive Care Among Adults: Insurance Status and Usual Source of Care" from the American Journal of Public Health;
"Contribution of Primary Care to Health Systems and Health" from The Milbank Quarterly;
"The Essential Role of Generalists in Health Care Systems" from the Annals of Internal Medicine;
"Medicare Spending, the Physician Workforce and Beneficiaries' Quality of Care" from Health Affairs; and
"Provider Continuity in Family Medicine: Does It Make a Difference for Total Health Care Costs?" from the Annals of Family Medicine.