Applications of physician profiling in the management of primary care panels

A primary care panel is a conceptual and institutional unit, in managed care organizations, that holds an individual primary care physician or a team of primary care physicians accountable for the care of a defined population of enrollees. A persistent question in ambulatory care management is how to align, across a set of primary care panels, the distribution of demand for primary care physician time with the distribution of supply of primary care physician time. Part of the solution to this resource allocation decision requires measurement of primary care panel case mix (a principal influence on demand); and, part of the solution requires measurement of physician practice (an influence on both demand and supply). The goals of this article are several, among them, to outline the reasons research and development in this area are important for the successful functioning of a primary care panel system, and to illustrate how methods of physician profiling may be usefully applied toward evaluating and implementing solutions to the alignment of demand for, and supply of, primary care physician time.