Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), especially since ChatGPT first gained wide recognition in 2022, have led to a wide array of potential applications and solutions for challenges in delivering improved primary care. There are several reasons to be optimistic that these technologies will be a positive transformative force, and some particular areas in which health care systems may also need to exercise some degree of caution. The following are some areas in which we might expect to see clinical improvements as an impact of AI integration, and some ...

It all started innocuously enough in the week leading up to Christmas in 2019 with a runny nose, a cough, and some fussiness. All pretty standard for our one-year-old daughter, who spends time with other kids at daycare sharing germs more readily than toys. Over the next few days, however, the cough got worse and the fussiness increased. We were still thinking it was just a cold until the lethargy hit. She wasn’t eating or drinking well, she had spiked a fever that wouldn’t level out, and seeing our normally active child—a girl who wasn’t even still when she slept—lying down listlessly ...

If you ask a patient to describe their experience finding a therapist or psychiatrist in the community, don’t be surprised if ‘expensive,’ ‘difficult,’ and ‘discouraging’ are some of the first words that come to mind. The decades-long separation of mental healthcare from physical health has left patients and clinicians alike with serious challenges navigating options for care. And the cost has been much more than just inconvenience—our poorly integrated system is responsible for

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to be felt across the United States, and this includes the ways in which we interact with the healthcare system. As the mother of a daughter with complex medical needs and a diabetic patient myself—what many would refer to as “super-users” of the medical system—we had to quickly adjust and adapt to the ways we’d need to manage our health conditions throughout the pandemic, as COVID has not stopped our need for ongoing care management. So, when I was asked to serve as faculty for the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) has a legacy of being outspoken on issues that matter to our patients and the communities in which our members serve. We advocate loudly for our most marginalized patients, including those who are transgender, those with limited English proficiency, those with disabilities and, of course, people of color. It is in that spirit we issued a

Access to comprehensive primary care has long been a challenge in the United States, and the economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will have far reaching implications on our healthcare system. Sixty percent of Americans have at least one chronic condition, and many patients have complex needs that require additional coordination, time and resources than what traditional models of care ...

As it became apparent in early March that COVID would become a global and not only local problem, health systems had to transition from a focus on individual patients who might have been exposed to thinking about a population-guided response. Thus, Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), an academic community healthcare system based in the Boston area, developed a comprehensive plan for COVID guided by the goal of “most lives and life years saved” that spanned both the hospital and the ambulatory space. This transition happened urgently and iteratively: in a few short weeks, we went from ...

The Primary Care Improvement Network (PCIN) is a membership-based network focused on supporting practice transformation, quality improvement, leadership skills, and the dissemination and spread of best practices. The program brings together important primary care stakeholders to address ongoing health care challenges. The goal of the program is to develop high-performing interdisciplinary teams to engage the PCIN themes of 2019-2020, which include effective implementation of telemedicine and effectively address health-related social needs. In the Primary Care sphere, there ...