October 12, 2023
The NCAFP Foundation in collaboration with the UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of North Carolina (UHC) has launched a pilot program that will provide sustainable hybrid medical care across the state. Through the pilot, the UHC will provide three rural primary care clinics with $100,000 each to hire new medical scribes and assistants.
UHC CEO Anita Bachmann says, “By collaborating with NCAFP, we are able to launch this innovative pilot project to increase the capacity of primary care providers in rural areas by eliminating up-front financial risk to the practice. This pilot is part of our comprehensive effort to reduce administrative burdens placed on our providers.”
NCAFP Executive Vice President and CEO Greg Griggs agrees with Bachmann about the promise of the pilot: “We are thrilled to be partnering with UnitedHealthcare on this innovative pilot project to evaluate the benefits of additional support in increasing access in small practices,” he says. “It is this type of innovation that can lead to greater access to health care for the most vulnerable North Carolinians.”
The pilot’s funding will go to three clinics in underserved areas of the state: Clinton Medical Practice in Clinton, Hodges Family Practice in Asheboro, and MedNorth Health Center in Wilmington. All three clinics are NCAFP member practices.
The additional administrative staff handling documentation of all interactions between patients and their physicians allows those physicians to spend more unhurried time with their patients. The American Medical Association finds that the integration of medical scribes into a team-based setting can improve physician-to-patient interactions, mitigate physician burnout by decreasing administrative concerns, and increase physicians’ overall satisfaction in their work. At the level of the entire clinic, adding a medical scribe who works in tandem with physicians, patients, and other departments can raise its members’ sense of teamwork, improve their productivity, and also increase clinics’ overall revenue.
Their teams are in different stages of planning their new hires and processes, but they all share excitement for what this funding will enable them to do.
Dr. Mayra Galeano, Chief Medical Officer at MedNorth Health Center, says that the team-based support of new hires will widen patients’ access to care: “We have a 1,200-person waitlist but we can’t take care of everybody that wants to be seen,” she says. “We’re trying to get all our team members to really work collaboratively. Then we’ll be able to provide better care and have more satisfaction with the care that we give.”
Marie Picola, Practice Manager at Hodges Family Practice, says, “We see there’s a lot of great potential in this change, and to have somebody help us put it together financially makes a huge difference.”
Matt Robinson, Practice Administrator at the Clinton Medical Practice, says, “Our team is really excited about it. We have detail-oriented physicians who like to drill down into the social determinants of health, and now I think they will really see some new value in their work with patients.”
Since telehealth options became crucial for receiving care during COVID-19, steps to sustain those options with new hires is key, especially in the communities where these participating practices work. Together, the NCAFP and UHC pilot program enables the practices to determine the new personnel and team-based processes that will better deliver primary care to more patients, more effectively.
The North Carolina Academy of Family Physicians, Inc. (NCAFP) is a nonprofit professional association headquartered in Raleigh which represents over 4,300 family physicians, family medicine residents, and medical students across the state. It is the largest medical specialty association in North Carolina and is a constituent chapter of the American Academy of Family Physicians, based in Leadwood, KS.