Primary Care Roadmap Overview

Governor Lamont’s vision for improving healthcare system performance is rooted in Executive Order No. 5, which, among other things, prioritizes the support of the state’s primary care infrastructure. Primary care, the foundation of our nation’s healthcare delivery system, is in trouble across the United States. There are multiple indicators of this trouble: fewer medical school students entering primary care, an aging primary care physician workforce, and high levels of burnout causing clinicians to leave the workforce.

Action is needed to help Connecticut’s dedicated primary care professionals to better meet the needs of their patients. This necessitates a strategy to complement the primary care spending targets so that increased primary care investments yield meaningful and measurable benefits. The Roadmap for Strengthening and Sustaining Primary Care (“Roadmap”) lays out this strategy, with actionable steps for more effective, efficient, and equitable primary care to better meet the needs of patients and sustain primary care professionals. From April through November 2021, OHS met monthly with the PCSG and facilitated a multi-step process to develop the Roadmap.  Throughout the development process, OHS solicited broad input on the evolving Roadmap from a wide array of stakeholders, including CT primary care practices, consumer advocates and groups, and insurers, to understand different perspectives and to make certain the Roadmap reflected CT’s current environment, ensured a patient-centered and patient-driven approach, supported primary care practices of all sizes, and would be feasible for stakeholders to implement.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

This draft Roadmap focuses on four key steps to strengthen and sustain primary care:

1. Establish core functional expectations of primary care practice teams.
2. Apply resources and supports to help practice teams master the core function expectations.
3. Develop methods to assess and recognize practice team performance.
4.  Make available voluntary primary care alternative payment models, beyond fee-for-service (FFS), to reimburse primary care.