POLICY & ADVOCACY By Gregory K. Griggs, MPA, CAE NCAFP Executive Vice President
National Academy of Medicine Summit in RTP Focuses on Value-Based Healthcare Importance of Primary Care/Family Medicine Emphasized
The National Academy of Medicine (NAM), under the direction of Dr. Victor Dzau, the former Chancellor of Health Affairs at Duke University, brought their Vital Directions for Health and Health Care Symposium to North Carolina last November, highlighting the innovative work going on in our state. The NAM, formerly the Institute of Medicine, is Congressionally-chartered to serve as the advisor to the nation on health and healthcare. The Academy launched the Vital Directions Initiative in 2016 to create “a comprehensive assessment of the issues that matter most to improving health” and present a framework for achieving better health and well-being, high-value healthcare and strong science and technology for the nation. The symposium served as the first in a series of state-based extensions of the national initiative to bring stakeholders together to better understand actions that are being taken at the state-level to improve health. Family Medicine played a central role in the two-day summit at the NC Biotechnology Center on November 21-22, 2019. One of the keynote speakers, Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc, called out the importance of Family Medicine and general Internal Medicine, noting that they 10
are two of the most underpaid and underappreciated specialties. DeSalvo was a Professor in the Department of Medicine and Population Health at the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School and previously served in the Obama Administration as Assistant Secretary for Health and National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Last December, she joined Google as their Chief Health Officer. “Technology and data analytics are tools that should give us more time and space and emotional energy to think and treat people as human beings,” DeSalvo said during her comments, emphasizing the personal touch of primary care. “Technology should help us understand context and trajectory to meet people where they are, but today we are too busy dealing with the cognitive burden. We need to get back to what is fundamental to all of this.” DeSalvo called on a national dashboard for health, saying the United States is constantly looking in the rearview mirror. “We can’t forecast or even now-cast,” she said. In comparison, DeSalvo noted that the minister of health in Cuba finds out every morning what happened the day before and looks to see how to address key health issues daily. In addition to keynote addresses by DeSalvo, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper and NC Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mandy Cohen, the event included a series of panels, including a perspective from Family Medicine in almost every panel. Past NCAFP President Dr. Karen L. Smith (2005), served on the first panel charged with outlining health care priorities and challenges in North Carolina, along with Steve Neorr, Senior Vice President of Population Health for Cone Health, and Dr. John Lumpkin, President of the BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina Foundation. Smith called on healthcare providers to be miracle makers for North Carolina healthcare transformation and make the ordinary, extraordinary. Neorr noted that being responsible for an ACO makes him have a different reaction to a high census at the
The North Carolina Family Physician
