Table 4

What Patients Can Expect of the Discipline of Family Medicine

Family medicine’s leadership will welcome collaboration with patients, employers, payers, policy makers, other primary care professionals, mental health clinicians, and public health to enhance the value and benefits of primary care, particularly the contribution that family physicians make, in meeting the health and health care needs of people throughout the United States
Family medicine will work to ensure that every person in the United States understands the value of and has the opportunity to have a personal relationship with a trusted family physician or other primary care professional in the context of a medical home
Family medicine will, in collaboration with primary care partners, be accountable for increasing the value of primary care for the patients served, using specific measures to do the following:

  1. Lower the total cost of care for the patients served

  2. Continuously improve the health and quality of care of the patients served

  3. Continuously improve each patient’s experience of and access to care, emphasizing the patient’s definition of both

Family medicine will collaborate with national stakeholders to reduce health disparities in the United States
Family medicine will lead, through ongoing outcomes-based research, the continued evolution of the patient-centered medical home to ensure it is the best way to deliver comprehensive, patient-centered care to the patients, families, and the communities served
Family medicine will work to ensure that the country has the well-trained primary care workforce it needs for the future through expansion and transformation of training from pipeline through practice
To give patients the comprehensive and coordinated care and attention they deserve, family medicine commits to moving primary care reimbursement away from fee-for-service and toward comprehensive primary care payment as quickly as possible in coordination with its primary care colleagues