The Primary Care Centers Roundtable: Translating Research into Impactful Policy.

In the 1990s, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) produced 2 reports aiming to strengthen primary care in the United States.1,2 Few of the reports’ recommendations have been fully implemented;3 and while primary care has languished, the health of the US population has worsened.4 Several recent efforts have shifted the discourse from why primary care infrastructure is needed to how to accelerate action and bridge the research-to-policy chasm. For example, The Starfield Summit series5,6 facilitated conversations among leaders in primary care research and policy that were intended to galvanize participants and enable research and policy agenda setting and dissemination.5 To complement these large and resource-intensive gatherings, there was a need for a smaller-scale, continuous thread of coordinated momentum and national activity. Thus, in 2017, a group of primary care research and policy center directors gathered informally at the North American Primary Care Research Group’s annual meeting in Montreal to discuss how we might better bridge research and policy, and The Primary Care Centers Roundtable (henceforth, the Roundtable) was created.7 A culminating and energizing moment for those involved in launching the Starfield Summits, the Roundtable, Family Medicine for America’s Health, and similar efforts, was the release of the 2021 report, entitled “Implementing High-Quality Primary Care: Rebuilding the Foundation of Health Care” by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM).3 This report re-confirms the evidence for why a strong primary care foundation is important and outlines a robust implementation roadmap for how to strengthen primary care. While some stakeholder groups viewed this report as the conclusion of an arduous journey, the report accelerated the Roundtable’s efforts; our work was just beginning.