BOSTON – Patients who are connected to a specific primary care physician, and not just to a specific practice or to no regular provider at all, are likelier to receive recommended care and complete recommended tests for preventive and chronic-illness care, a new study shows.
The study, published in the latest Annals of Internal Medicine, looked at 155,590 adults in a primary care network to determine which patients received most of their care from a specific physician, a specific practice, or neither.
They found that patients who were connected to a specific physician were more likely to have health insurance, speak English, and be non-Hispanic white. However, “connectedness,” as they called the closeness of patients’ relationships with their doctors, was associated with larger disparities in screening rates than was race or ethnicity. •
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