PRIME Registry Illuminates the Role of Primary Care

Since its launch in 2016, ABFM has offered the PRIME Registry to Diplomates and to other primary care clinicians to meet their needs for assessing and reporting on their clinical quality. Additionally, PRIME was also designed to help tell the primary care story – something never more important than during the COVID-19 pandemic. Primary care is where most people in the US have their health care relationships and receive most, or all, of their care. Yet it represents the least studied health care setting. During the worst pandemic in a century, primary care was largely left out of federal response strategies, leaving many practices struggling financially even while patients turned to them for care. The PRIME Registry is shining a light on those relationships, hardships, and on the capacity of primary care to help.

“For decades, the promise of primary care has been laid at the feet of front-line providers who work tirelessly to meet the needs of their individual patients. But, with no overarching way to view how their care, and the care of their colleagues, impacts their communities, physicians and care teams are only getting part of the story,” says Dr. John Brady, physician and PRIME participant. “The PRIME registry holds the key to unlocking this vital information by allowing us to finally view the larger healthcare landscape in an actionable way. It is a unique and powerful tool that, once set up, takes very little effort to maintain. I believe the PRIME registry is a transformative tool whose potential is only starting to be appreciated.”

Before the pandemic, ABFM and the Center for Professionalism & Value in Health Care developed a research relationship with Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences (Stanford PHS) that could enable use of PRIME data for research while protecting the data under multiple layers of HIPAA and legal security. Stanford’s protections and data skills enabled ABFM to look at the financial impact of COVID-19 on practices, transitions to telehealth, and the heroic work of primary care to help patients.

Early analyses allowed us to inform the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) about how the pandemic could be tracked through primary care visits, how COVID-19 patterns differed from influenza, and how measures of social deprivation could be used to assess COVID-19 disparities. The project’s goal is to inform policy on how to better support primary care practices and to learn about how to improve outcomes for patients and their families.