The Primary Care Centers Roundtable: Translating Research into Impactful Policy

Who We Are: The Roundtable

The Roundtable is a volunteer collective of primary care research and policy centers from across the United States. Our members are dedicated to driving research and informing policy to promote widespread access to high-quality primary care. Center leaders are frontline primary care clinicians, researchers, and thought leaders. Information about the Roundtable, its efforts, and its 10 centers can be found here.⁷

The mission of the Roundtable is to maintain a continued focus on the evidence necessary to advance primary care and to foment a primary care movement. As collaborators, the Roundtable identifies activities where we can accomplish more by working together than separately, eg, joint research, education, dissemination, advising, convening, and presentations. The Roundtable prioritizes initiatives that support translating existing research and generating new policy-relevant evidence that will inform positive change.

What We Are Doing: Our Past and Current Work

Initially, the Roundtable identified ways to provide evidence to the NASEM committee that produced the 2021 report, including serving on and presenting to the committee. After its public release, the Roundtable shifted focus to informing the report’s implementation. Although all recommendations are top priorities, the Roundtable emphasized the importance of establishing federal leadership on primary care⁸ within the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This will increase the likelihood and feasibility of implementing many of the other recommendations, especially those where the federal government is the principal actor in creating lasting change and building accountability, eg, payment reform, workforce development, information technology redesign, research investments. We also described a path for coordinating this leadership.⁹ Other Roundtable publications include articles about the current primary care crisis,^10-11 a commentary demonstrating the important role primary care clinicians fulfill in caring for the whole person,¹² what happens when care is highly specialized and fragmented,¹² and several commentaries suggesting different paths toward rebuilding primary care.^13-15

More broadly, the Roundtable organizes regular meetings with sponsors of the NASEM report to collaborate on efforts to inform its implementation. This includes members who participated in the creation of the nation’s first scorecard for primary care,¹⁶ as well as efforts to examine the methods and approaches to measure primary care spending in the United States.

What Do We Plan to Do: Our Future Work

Moving forward, the Roundtable will continue to elevate understanding about primary care and its value, potential, and needs among policy makers and other key stakeholders, as well as to support implementation of the 2021 NASEM report recommendations. The Roundtable will further our goals by engaging one another, new primary care research and policy centers that emerge, and international primary care partners to:

• Generate and/or synthesize new, policy-relevant evidence to inform primary care on multiple fronts, including payment, delivery, workforce, access, and quality

• Translate primary care evidence for policy makers and other decision makers through policy briefs, infographics, blog posts, and the like, to be strategically shared in meetings, webinars, and via testimony

• Convene key leaders committed to improving primary care

• Provide technical assistance where applicable

We also seek new and innovative ways to communicate more broadly with the primary care workforce, patients, policy makers, and change agents about why they need primary care and what they can do to help strengthen it.