Posted by: AtlasMD

June 28, 2013

AAFP CREATES POLICY ON DIRECT PRIMARY CARE

The AAFP released an official statement on DPC. It’s going to bat for practices like ours. We especially like their word choice in their support for both doctors’ AND patients’ choice to embark on direct care. In our opinion, the free market principle of choice is what behooves our healthcare system, offering competitive options that eliminate red tape and incentivize innovation (like we’re doing with atlas.md). Couple that with increased public awareness of unfair, exorbitant costs associated with greedy pill makers and we might continue to see falling healthcare costs in the upcoming years.

“The AAFP supports the physician and patient choice to, respectively, provide and receive health care in any ethical health care delivery system mode, including the DPC practice setting,” says the policy. It notes that the model is structured to “emphasize and prioritize” the physician/patient relationship to improve health outcomes and lower costs

As Gandhi once said, Be the change you want to see. We are that change in primary care. But we’re human, too. We prefer receiving support, instead of resistance.

View the AAFP’s policy on Direct Primary Care here.

AAFP Embraces DPC, Creates New Policy Guidelines

Wait, is this the same Association of American Family Practitioners who’s been used by dated critics to turn direct care into another Red Scare? They once warned, according to the LA Times, that direct primary care could lead to further shortage of doctors down the line. We, of course, knew better and said, No, unhappy doctors who refuse to practice altogether should be the real concern. We’ve been charging ahead, day-by-day, doing what we believe in, and the media is paying attention. Meanwhile, the AFFP maintained a strictly neutral opinion, to our awareness. But now it appears they’ve leapt off the fence and into our court, with a new article highlighting three direct care practices, including Atlas MD.

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Writer Contributes Op/Ed Piece To Heal Overwhelmed Physicians

Jerry Avorn is a professor of medicine at Harvard and an internist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He’s also the author of “Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs.” He wrote an eccentric and slightly polemic opinion piece in The New York Times that connects Marie-Henri Beyle, pseudonym Stendahl, with the current state of primary care treatment techniques.

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