Primary Care Visit Regularity and Patient Outcomes: an Observational Study

Area of Science:

• Health Services Research
• Primary Care Medicine
• Healthcare Quality Improvement

Background:

• Primary care visits offer opportunities for proactive healthcare delivery.
• The relationship between the temporal regularity of primary care visits and patient outcomes has not been previously studied.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the association between the temporal regularity of primary care (PC) visits and key healthcare outcomes.
• To determine if visit regularity predicts emergency department (ED) visits, hospitalizations, and Medicare expenditures.

Main Methods:

• Retrospective cohort study utilizing Medicare claims data from 378,862 beneficiaries across 1328 federally qualified health centers (2010-2014).
• Beneficiaries were grouped by annual PC visit frequency and regularity (more vs. less than median).
• Clinics were categorized by the regularity of their patients' PC visits compared to predictions.

Main Results:

• Within each visit frequency group, beneficiaries with less regular PC visits experienced higher rates of ED visits, hospitalizations, and costs.
• Specifically, among frequent PC users, less regular visit patterns correlated with significantly more ED visits, hospitalizations, and Medicare expenditures.
• Clinics with more regular PC visit patterns demonstrated better outcomes, though with smaller effect sizes.

Conclusions:

• The temporal regularity of primary care visits is significantly correlated with patient outcomes.
• Assessing PC visit regularity can help identify high-risk beneficiaries and serve as a metric for clinic-level quality improvement initiatives.