Population health challenges in primary care: What are the unfinished tasks and who should do them?

Background: There are numerous recommendations from expert sources that help guide primary care providers in cancer screening, infectious disease screening, metabolic screening, monitoring of drug levels, and chronic disease management. Little is known about the potential effort needed for a healthcare system to address these recommendations, or the patient effort needed to complete the recommendations.

Methods: For 73 recommended population healthcare items, we examined each of 28,742 patients in a primary care internal medicine practice to determine whether they were up-to-date on recommended screening, immunizations, counseling, and chronic disease management goals. We used a rule-based software tool that queries the medical record for diagnoses, dates, laboratory values, pathology reports, and other information used in creating the individualized recommendations. We counted the number of uncompleted recommendations by age groups and examined the healthcare staff needed to address the recommendations and the potential patient effort needed to complete the recommendations.

Results: For the 28,742 patients, there were 127,273 uncompleted recommendations identified for population health management (mean recommendations per patient 4.36, standard deviation of 2.65, range of 0-17 recommendations per patient). The age group with the most incomplete recommendations was age of 50-65 years with 5.5 recommendations per patient. The 18-35 years age group had the fewest incomplete recommendations with 2.6 per patient. Across all age groups, initiation of these recommendations required high-level input (physician, nurse practitioner, or physician's assistant) in 28%. To completely adhere to recommended services, a 1000-patient cross-section cohort would require a total of 464 procedures and 1956 lab tests.

Conclusion: Providers and patients face a daunting number of tasks necessary to meet guideline-generated recommendations. We will need new approaches to address the burgeoning numbers of uncompleted recommendations.