Beyond the exam room: How primary care and community partnerships could transform chronic disease prevention

People enjoy healthier lives when their physicians work with community partnerships sharing the goal of improving social and behavioral factors that treat or worsen chronic disease.

“Using Community Partnerships to Inform the Prevention Strategy of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation” is a new consensus study report published this spring by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The academies’ Standing Committee on Primary Care drafted it as a detailed roadmap for building effective partnerships between physicians’ practices, health care organizations, and community organizations. The committee examined what makes these partnerships work, where they fail, and what the federal government should do to fund and sustain them at scale. Drawing on real-world models from Massachusetts to Alaska, it delivers three concrete recommendations for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

This slideshow summarizes the report's key findings. All data points come from the report, which is available free online.