ArticleJournal of primary care & community health
The Effect of Primary Care Visits on Total Patient Care Cost: Evidence From the Veterans Health Administration.
Article in Journal of primary care & community health. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Power of Primary Care to Improve Health.Annals of family medicine · 2026Article
- International Generalist Physicians' Conceptions of Generalism: "The Way," "The Privilege," and "The Indescribable Whole".Annals of family medicine · 2026Article
- Primary Care Cost Sharing in Medicare Advantage.JAMA health forum · 2026Article
- Randomized communication nudges to increase primary care engagement among Medicaid enrollees in Maine.Health affairs scholar · 2026Article
- Primary Care or Primary Problem? Aligning Access Pathways with Patient Needs Across the Care Continuum.Journal of market access & health policy · 2026Article
- Application of a machine learning model to predict the estimated primary care patient time consumption.npj health systems · 2026Article
- Chronic conditions and healthcare cost and utilization among underserved Medicare beneficiaries.PloS one · 2026Article
- Impact of spatial accessibility to primary care physicians on health care outcomes and costs.International journal of health geographics · 2025Article
- Bolstering Primary Care and Pharmacy Collaboration as a Solution to Health Care Workforce, Access and Affordability Issues.North Carolina medical journal · 2025Article
- The effect of Covid-19 pandemic on the primary health care utilization and cost: an interrupted time series analysis.Cost effectiveness and resource allocation : C/E · 2025Article
- Impact of a Virtual Care Navigation Service on Member-Reported Outcomes Among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Populations: Case Study.JMIR formative research · 2025Article
- The rise of commodity care.Frontiers in health services · 2025Article
- An updated overview of radiomics-based artificial intelligence (AI) methods in breast cancer screening and diagnosis.Radiological physics and technology · 2024Review
- Health Status and Healthcare Utilization Patterns of Emergency Department Patients Who Prefer a Language Other Than English.Journal of immigrant and minority health · 2024Article
- The contribution of Specialist Family Physicians to South Africa's private sector: A position statement.South African family practice : official journal of the South African Academy of Family Practice/Primary Care · 2024Article
- Counting the Cost of Pins and Needles: A Case Study of Paresthesias and the Cost of Healthcare in the United States.Cureus · 2024Article
- The capacity and training needs of primary health care workers in Nyeri and Nakuru counties of Kenya: a cross-sectional study.Frontiers in medicine · 2024Article
- Impact of Primary Care Visit Frequency on Non-Urgent Emergency Department Visits in a Large Urban Medical Center.Journal of primary care & community healthArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundSince the 1980s, primary care (PC) in the US has been recognized as the backbone of healthcare providing comprehensive care to complex patients, coordinating care among specialists, and rendering preventive services to contain costs and improve clinical outcomes. However, the effect of PC visits on total patient care cost has been difficult to quantify.
objectiveTo assess the effect of PC visits on total patient care cost.
methodsThis is a retrospective study of over 5 million patients assigned to a PC provider in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) in each of the 4 fiscal years (FY 2016-2019). The main outcome of interest is total annual patient care cost. We assessed the effect of primary care visits on total patient care cost first by descriptive statistics, and then by multivariate regressions adjusting for severity of illness and other confounders. We conducted in-depth sensitivity analyses to validate the findings.
resultsOn average, each additional in-person PC visit was associated with a total cost reduction of $721 (per patient per year). The first PC visit was associated with the largest savings, $3976 on average, and a steady diminishing return was observed. Further, the higher the patient risk (severity of illness), the larger the cost reduction: Among the top 10% of high-risk patients, the first PC in-person visit was associated with a reduction of $16 406 (19%).
conclusionsThese findings, substantiated by our exhaustive sensitivity analyses, suggest that expanding PC capacity can significantly reduce overall health care costs and improve patient care outcomes given the former is a strong proxy of the latter.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.