primary health care clinic :: Article CreatorCVS And MGB Want To Join Forces To Expand Primary Care In Mass.
The clinics would join MGB's network of providers, which means they could refer patients to MGB hospitals, specialists, diagnostic services, and laboratories if they needed follow-up care.
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Most MinuteClinic sites currently offer limited services, such as diagnosing strep throat or urinary tract infections or providing vaccinations for COVID-19, influenza, shingles, and other preventable illnesses. But in the past year, CVS began to offer broader adult primary care to members of health insurer Aetna, a subsidiary of CVS, in nearly a dozen states.
Now MinuteClinic is poised to make its first foray into primary care in Massachusetts, assuming the state commission clears the way. The commission is reviewing the proposal to ensure it wouldn't raise the cost or hurt the quality of health care.
If the commission has concerns, it can refer the matter to the state attorney general's office, the Department of Public Health, or another agency for further investigation.
The filings with the commission provided few details about the collaboration, including the specific primary care services the clinics would offer.
Shannon Dillon, a CVS spokesperson, said the collaboration is still in the early stages. But she said new services could include electrocardiograms and other diagnostic tests, management of chronic diseases, and an on-call physician.
She expected the commission to issue findings near the end of the year and MinuteClinic to begin offering primary care in early 2026.
"As one of the nation's largest employers of ... Nurse practitioners and physician associates, MinuteClinic is well-positioned to address gaps in comprehensive primary care access," she said in a statement. "Many of the patients we see at MinuteClinic either don't have a primary care provider or have not seen one in years."
Jessica Pastore, a spokesperson for MGB, said the shortage of primary care physicians has resulted in "unprecedented volume" for doctors, prompting the health system to look for solutions. Too often, patients without primary care providers end up in hospital emergency rooms, the most expensive places to receive care.
"This affiliation will expand access across the Commonwealth with a particular focus on regions with demonstrated shortages," she said in a statement.
Pastore said the venture wouldn't require any financial investment by MGB. CVS would join MGB's "accountable care organization," or ACO.
The ACO contracts with government or commercial insurers to provide integrated care, earning bonuses for meeting cost and quality targets or getting penalized if it doesn't. The MinuteClinic sites would be owned, operated, and paid for by CVS, she said.
Although Massachusetts has some of the most sought-after doctors in the world, primary care is badly broken for patients and physicians, according to a report issued in January by the commission.
More patients are reporting difficulty finding doctors. Physicians are struggling with overwhelming workloads. The corps of primary care providers is aging, and the medical education system isn't producing enough doctors to replace them.
Pay and work-life balance are reasons why many young doctors opt not to pursue careers in primary care. Primary care physicians typically earn less than specialists and often work longer hours, reviewing lab results, fielding questions from patients on the phone or on portals, and dealing with insurers.
Although the shortage of primary care doctors is a nationwide problem, it is particularly acute in Massachusetts. A recent report by AMN Healthcare, a staffing company, found that Boston has the longest average wait for a patient to see a primary care physician among 15 metropolitan areas in the country, from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., at 69 days.
David E. Williams, president of the Boston consulting firm Health Business Group, said both CVS Health and MGB likely see different benefits to the partnership.
MinuteClinic, as part of MGB, would gain cachet. "They're not just a drug store clinic," Williams said.
MGB, meanwhile, would benefit from MinuteClinic referring patients to the health system for other treatments and services, Williams said.
MGB, however, hasn't discussed the collaboration with its primary care physicians, who voted 183 to 26 on May 30 to join the Services Employees International Union, said Dr. Michael Barnett, a primary care physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a leader of the local chapter of SEIU's Doctors Council. He added that he welcomes any effort to make primary care more accessible.
"What I would want to see is more transparency around how the partnership is going to impact primary care access across the whole MGB system, including in Eastern Massachusetts," Barnett said. "We know there are lots of unaddressed problems in the MGB system as it currently stands.
"They're proposing expanding the network with a completely new model."
MGB got feedback from clinicians in the fall of 2023 "about the need for new solutions and exploring new models of care," said Pastore, the MGB spokesperson. In May of this year, Dr. Anne Klibanski, chief executive of MGB, also pledged to invest $400 million over the next five years in primary care, including hiring 90 new support staffers and four more doctors and creating a new chief of primary care.
Among the many questions left unanswered by the potential MGB-CVS collaboration is whether patients who need primary care would be satisfied receiving it from less highly trained nurse practitioners or physician associates instead of physicians.
After completing college, doctors typically attend medical school for four years and then spend three to seven years in residency, depending on the specialty.
Nurse practitioners typically attend college for four years to earn a nursing degree and spend two to three years in an advanced practitioner program, depending on whether they earn a master's or a doctoral degree.
Over the next decade, the number of Massachusetts nurse practitioners providing primary care is projected to surge by more than 60 percent, to 4,360, while the number of primary care physicians is expected to increase by less than 4 percent, to 7,940, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.
CVS, headquartered in Woonsocket, R.I., is hardly the only retail giant that has sought to get into primary care.
In recent years, Walgreens and Walmart set up scores of clinics in their stores, with the goal of making health care as convenient as picking up prescription drugs or groceries. But the retail giants soon scrapped or scaled back their efforts, which proved financially challenging.
"It hasn't been too successful," Williams, the health care consultant, said of the business model. "The theory is good, but in practice, people don't want to get their medical care the same place they're picking up dog food."
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jonathan.Saltzman@globe.Com.
'You Need To Have The Conversation': More Primary Care Clinics Are ...
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Though many people associate a primary care clinic visit with physical health care, a growing percentage of primary care providers are now also caring for their patients' mental health.
At The Good Clinic, group of primary care clinics with six Twin Cities locations, nurse practitioners provide mental and behavioral health support for clients in the form of screening and treatment for anxiety and depression. Sometimes this treatment includes providing prescriptions for antidepressants and other psychiatric medications.
"We can manage many behavioral health issues," said Kevin Lee Smith, DNP, Good Clinic chief nurse practitioner officer. "We can prescribe mental health medication based on the individual. We take a collaborative approach where we offer referrals for counseling, psychology or psychiatry when necessary, if this is someone who might be beyond the more common depression and anxiety diagnoses."
Offering these services is a natural extension of the "person-centered" approach to health care that's part and parcel of the primary-care approach to medicine, Smith said.
"Addressing mental health issues has been an important component of our approach from the get-go," he explained. When leadership set out to design The Good Clinic, Smith continued, "we looked at where there are gaps in health care in general, especially in primary care. It was clear there were opportunities for improvement in mental health care for our clients."
[image_caption]Kevin Lee Smith[/image_caption]Smith said that a large percentage of Americans now seek mental health support from their primary care providers, rather than from mental health-focused providers like psychologists or psychiatrists. There are many reasons for this trend.
"For some individuals," he said, "there's a barrier in accessing mental health services because they think they might have to go to a specialist for treatment or because there is a stigma around seeing a psychologist or a counselor."
Because people are often more familiar with their primary care provider, and because primary care clinics offer routine screenings for common mental health conditions, a growing number of people turn to those providers for assistance with their mental and behavioral health concerns.
"One of the reasons that a great deal of behavioral health services are being provided in primary care clinics is that trusting relationship that is developed over time with repeated visits," Smith said. "Having that trust makes it OK for many clients to talk about their mental health issues."
More treatment options
This spring, in an extension of its mental and behavioral health support offerings, The Good Clinic began offering clients the option of using GeneSight, genetic testing that determines how an individual may respond to specific mental health medications before actually taking them. Because not all mental health medications work the same for every person, this option can help avoid multiple medication trials.
Not so long ago, GeneSight tests were only available at large medical institutions like the Mayo Clinic, but in recent years, they have become available to smaller providers. Smith said that Good Clinic staff were excited to add this option for their clients. The test is taken with a cheek swab, and can be done in a medical provider's office or at home, though it must be ordered by a health care professional. The swabbed sample is then sent to a lab for analysis, and a color-coded report is issued, listing medications that are safe to use as directed (green), have a potential for moderate gene-drug interaction (yellow) or a significant history of gene-drug interaction (red).
Smith said that he and his colleagues wanted to offer GeneSight to their clients as a way to help make the process of finding the right mental health medication easier and less time-consuming.
"For many antidepressant medications, a typical approach for a provider is to ask a patient to take the medication for 4 or 6 weeks, giving it that much time to see if it has the expected benefit. If the medication doesn't have a positive impact, the dose could be adjusted or the patient might have to start over again with another medication and take the time to see if that one works."
That time commitment may be OK for one or two rounds, but often patients have to try several medications to find the right match. Long trial periods that result in less-than-ideal results or discouraging side effects mean higher patient drop-out rates.
"With the GeneSight testing," Smith said, "you are able to determine from the get-go whether or not this individual will appropriately metabolize that medication. It really saves a lot of time."
[image_caption]Paul Linson[/image_caption]Paul Linson, lead nurse practitioner at The Good Clinic's St. Louis Park location, has used GeneSight testing for several of his patients. He said the test has helped him help his patients find the right medication in a shorter amount of time.
"I have used GeneSight for various reasons," Linson said. "The test has guided treatment in cases where the client wanted to start with something accurate from the very beginning. It has also been useful to guide therapy in people who have tried other medications that didn't work or they had side effects. In each case, the information we have received from the test has been very helpful."
Longer appointments
The Good Clinic was founded and is staffed by nurse practitioners. The philosophy of this field of medicine, Smith explained, tends to be more holistic, with a focus on a range of needs of each individual patient, or client. "Nurse practitioners are focused around the bio-psycho-social person," Smith said. "We're not just working with individuals with conditions. You can't treat a condition without the context of who that human is."
Taking this kind of approach to patient care means that providers take time to truly understand their clients' needs, Smith said. This often means that discussions about care will extend beyond physical health concerns: "A component of that is addressing behavioral or mental health. That's been part of primary care practice for a very long time."
Treating the whole patient requires more time than a classic "blood pressure-reflexes-weight" checkup. "We build our schedules around being able to give our clients the opportunity to talk about their concerns," Smith said. "Our appointments are 30 and 60 minutes long. We want to take the time to really understand what the individual's concerns are."
The extra time often allows room for a patient to build the relationship and talk more freely about their mental health, Smith said.
"In most health care clinics, every client who comes through gets screenings for depression and anxiety. Those are good tools, but you also need slow down, to make time, to build the relationship. You need to have the conversation."
In those longer conversations, Smith said that Good Clinic nurse practitioners work to help clients understand possible connections between their physical health and their mental health. All bodily systems work together as one whole, he explained.
It's not unusual for a client to make an appointment for treatment of a physical issue but leave seeing that there might be a connection to their mental health, Smith said. "Generally I would say that the individuals where we are managing their mental health issues typically are seeing us for other things as well. Their mental health is often not the chief complaint or the reason for their visit. Usually it is an issue that comes out of their coming in for other kinds of care."
Helping clients make those connections can lead to a greater understanding of how the human body actually works, Smith said. "Oftentimes, clients are not aware of the connection between their physical symptoms and their mental health issues. We try to look at the individual, look at all the components that make up that person's physical and mental health and treat them all equally. Those connections are very strong."
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