Dr. Diane Rittenhouse, Senior Fellow at Mathematica: Fixing Primary Care’s Broken Math

It would take a single primary care physician 26.7 hours per day to deliver all the recommended care for the patients that he or she is responsible for. That impossible math is the starting point for a major California Healthcare Foundation report examining why access to primary care keeps falling short, even in a state where nearly everyone has insurance. “In our culture we tend to look at the new and the shiny and the technological, so we're at this crossroads where primary care has been under-resourced,” says the report’s lead author, Dr. Diane Rittenhouse, a senior fellow at Mathematica and professor of Family Medicine and Health Policy at the University of California San Francisco. While recruitment, retention, and training were identified as key issues to address, the role of payment to shape what’s possible in each of those categories stood out to researchers. "Practices hire the teams they can afford, not necessarily the teams that patients need, and training programs train for jobs that exist in the marketplace,” she tells Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan. Beyond fixing the payment system, this revealing conversation also explores why practices of all types describe the same hiring struggle, what educators can do to build trust on care teams, and where AI fits into primary care's future. Report On Strengthening California’s Primary Care Team Workforce