On May 17th and 18th, members of Primary Care for America (PCfA) participated in the Modern Healthcare Transformation Summit to ensure that important conversations around changes to the health care industry include the role that primary care plays in reducing health care costs, improving patient outcomes, and creating new growth opportunities.

PCfA members joined their colleagues from hospitals and health systems, suppliers, payers, venture capitalists and other entities along the care continuum to discuss how leaders can drive and implement transformation in their own organizations.

COVID burnout and health care staffing challenges and retention

Founding PCfA member and chief people officer at agilon health, Mat Varghese, was featured in a panel discussion that focused on health care staffing challenges and retention where he highlighted some of the challenges that primary care physicians and their practices have faced. Specifically, Dr. Varghese highlighted the issue of “COVID burnout” from physicians and staff due to increased demand, long hours, and stress.

With the pandemic ongoing and burnout becoming more prevalent, the panelists identified key areas that need to be addressed in order to attract and retain talent, including:

• Seeking nontraditional sources of talent
• Providing cross-training to expand individuals’ skill sets
• Listening to the needs of the workforce and innovating accordingly.

Additionally, the panelists discussed how technology has to be leveraged to solve our most complex workforce issues, including leveraging technology to predict our needs ahead of time and acting accordingly.

Innovation, expertise and funding – the keys to transforming the health care infrastructure

Andy Thompson, President, East Region, VillageMD and founding PCfA member, shared, “overall, the Transformation Summit provided a fantastic opportunity to connect innovation, expertise, and funding in order to deliver positive transformation to US health care.  The entire health care space continues to represent an ever-growing need and opportunity for such thinking, and the core of innovation rests in primary care.  We must continue these important discussions around how coordination, cost reduction, experience enhancement, and effective flow of information to improve patients’ lives is absolutely critical, and nothing is closer to the nucleus of those needs than primary care.”

Visit our resources page to learn more about how primary care is the key to driving innovation in patient care and better patient outcomes.

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