Primary Care: Bright Spots

As part of our Care Models programs, our fellows and researchers have sought to systematically identify mainstream U.S. health care providers that operate at the frontier of value-based care – high-quality care designed to help lower total annual healthcare spending.

Our research approach is to:

  1. Analyze claims data to identify physician-practice sites across the United States that deliver high-quality care at a total lower cost.

  2. Compare average annual total health care spending per patient or treatment episode at each high-quality care site. Practice sites that ranked at the top of both measures – the delivery of both high-quality and low-cost care – are designated as high-value sites for further study.

  3. Conduct surveys and site visits of high-value and average-value teams to tease out attributes of care that distinguish them.

Projects and Outcomes

CERC identified 10 distinguishing features of Primary Care practices that deliver higher quality care at a lower-than-average total cost. These exemplary practices not only have better outcomes, their patients are highly satisfied with the care they receive, and they have high-functioning care teams who are deeply satisfied in their work.

Under a grant from the Peterson Center on Healthcare, CERC reviewed national quality and cost data, and identified 11 primary care practices  delivering exceptional value—higher quality at significantly less cost—to their patients.

These providers of Most Valuable Care (MVPs) have defined a path toward better, more affordable healthcare. They have key features in common that can serve as a blueprint for others to achieve high performance.

Publications and News