Primary Care — ACORN

Primary Care Advocacy

Virginia Commonwealth University family medicine residencies

VCU has five affiliated family medicine residency programs in South Hill, Fairfax, Newport News, Front Royal, and Midlothian. They have collectively trained thousands of family physicians who have gone on to serve the Commonwealth of Virginia and many stay in the communities where they were trained. In three years (2019-2021), VCU-affiliated family medicine residency program graduates saw 1,580,725 unique Virginians, or nearly 20% of the population. Their significant role in the delivery of primary care is thanks to the efforts of the directors, faculty, and staff at each site. You can visit the VCU Family Medicine website for more information and click on the one-pagers below to learn about the footprint of each residency.

Primary care as value center

A recent article from Dr. Luci Leykum in the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst - Reconceptualizing Primary Care: From Cost Center to Value Center - highlights that preserving and improving primary care will not be an automatic result of value-based reimbursement. Instead, this requires rethinking care to focus on relationships among the four pillars of primary care: patients and their families, physicians, health systems, and their surrounding communities. See our summary.

Virginia Primary Care Survey

Funded by the Virginia Department of Medical Assistance Services and supported by the Virginia Task Force on Primary Care, the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Family Medicine and Population Health and the Ambulatory Care Outcomes Research Network are tracking the state, scope, capacity, and health of primary care in Virginia.

Annually, we identify every primary care practice and clinician in the state. And every four years, we conduct a practice-level survey to understand how the practices are serving their communities. The survey has been conducted twice, in 2018-2019 before Medicaid expansion and in 2021-2022 after Medicaid expansion and the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are grateful for the practices, clinicians, staff, and professional organizations that have helped us with this effort.