Assessing Primary Care’s Core Contributions: Continuity, Trust, and Stewardship

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Primary care’s value includes helping patients interpret symptoms, navigate fragmented care, integrate recommendations, and avoid unnecessary tests, referrals, medications, and treatment burden.
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A proposed Primary Care Value Dashboard would assess whether care is accessible, relational, integrated, and effective in supporting people to live well over time.
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Continuity and trust can persist across team-based care when clinicians recognize patients’ histories and goals and help integrate their care.
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Measures of access, continuity, trust, coordination, and treatment burden can capture primary care functions that were historically considered intangible.
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The authors propose initially using patient-reported measures for learning and quality improvement, while noting that workforce shortages, underinvestment, fragmentation, and misaligned payment remain

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