The Relationship Between Follow-up Appointments and Access to Primary Care

Health care operations managers need to balance scheduling frequent follow-ups for patients with chronic conditions and fitting in patients requiring care for new complaints.

We quantify how frequency of follow-up visits corresponds with access to care for patients receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

We use patient data collected between October 2013 and June 2016 by the Survey of Healthcare Experiences of Patients (SHEP). Our sample is comprised of 94,496 patients. We estimate logistic models with 1-month lagged facility-level predictors.

We calculate monthly measures characterizing facility-level service provision, including the average time between successive primary care visits, the average primary care visit length, the percentage of primary care appointments that are overbooked, the percent of visits that are unscheduled (i.e., walk-ins), and the ratio of patients to providers. We control for economic factors that are associated with health care supply and demand, including median household income, veteran priority status, the Zillow Housing Price Index, and veteran unemployment rates. We also control for patient demographics.

We restrict the data to patients with at least one in-person primary care visit who have provided information on their ability to access urgent and routine care.

We find that shorter average follow-up times are associated with better access for patients needing urgent or routine care. A 1-month increase in the average time between successive primary care visits is associated with 10% (p < 0.001) lower odds of reporting being able to access urgent care within 1 day and 13% (p < 0.001) lower odds of reporting usually or always being able to access routine care when needed.

Facilities with higher average follow-up times are more likely to have patients report that they are unable to quickly access urgent or routine primary care.