Our background
At PrairieStar, we strive to always provide our community with the very best care. We believe when we focus on delivering exceptional patient-centered care, patients receive immediate and immense benefits. And our patients agree.
Whether it is a patient who comes to walk-in care and realizes they are dealing with a long-term health challenge or a patient with hypertension or diabetes who is finally able to get their condition stabilized—our patients realize that when they come to PrairieStar, their family is going to be treated by our expert medical team who truly wants to meet their medical needs.
PrairieStar has been recognized with 44 national quality awards and back-to-back National Quality Leader awards, ranking us in the top 1-2% of all Federally Qualified Health Centers nationwide. Simply put, we know that our family practice providers are doing a great job when it comes to caring for our community.
And yet there is always room for improvement.
Recent headlines raise concerns
You may have seen the news story in the Hutchinson News dated June 26th claiming there is a shortage of family practice providers in Hutchinson.
PrairieStar was surprised to learn from the news story that Hutchinson Hospital had been working on a project, for several years, to hire family practice providers. Their decision was based in part on community health assessment data that claims there is a shortage of primary care providers in Hutchinson.
Is there a shortage of family practice providers? The short answer is no, but as a nationally recognized provider of family medicine, we believe it is important to clarify the current status concerning the number of family practice providers in Hutchinson.
Clearing up the confusion
In the referenced news story, the terms “primary care” and “family practice” are used interchangeably. This could lead to the community believing there is an overwhelming need for more family practice providers that simply does not—currently—exist.
Differentiating between primary care and family practice is important in understanding why there isn’t a shortage of family practice providers in Hutchinson. Primary care providers include several provider types: family practice/medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, and obstetrics/gynecology. In addition to primary care physicians (MDs and DOs), there are also primary care mid-levels such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants.
The news story stated Hutchinson Clinic and PrairieStar have a combined 18 family practice physicians and there is a need for 54 more primary care physicians for a total of 72. This makes it seem like there is a shortage of 54 family practice physicians, but family practice physicians are just one type of primary care provider (PCP).
We know there are 49 PCPs in Hutchinson. Of those 49 PCPs, 30 are family practice providers, which is considerably more than the 18 estimated by hospital administration. Even 30 family practice providers would not be sufficient if only population size, panel size, encounter ratios, etc. were taken into account, but that’s not all that needs to be considered.
Other variables to consider
When determining provider needs other variables must be accounted for resulting in the number of providers needed, being adjusted downward. The most important variable is those patients that simply choose not to establish care with a PCP. Twenty-five percent of Americans don’t have a PCP, and according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study, nearly half of 18 – 29-year-olds don’t have a PCP. This is mostly due to the prevalence of walk-in care clinics, alternative medicine options, and the mix of medical specialists that retain primary care patients in their panels.
While there might be a shortage of one or more primary care provider types, there is not a shortage of family practice providers. The current 30 family practice providers are sufficient to meet the family medicine needs of our community. In any event, at PrairieStar we are here to serve our patients and collaborate with the medical community on adaptive challenges.
PrairieStar seeks to help Hutchinson Medical Community find a solution—together.
Even though there isn’t a shortage of family practice providers, the news story still highlights some concerns in the medical community. There is no question that some patients are going elsewhere for their healthcare, but it has nothing to do with a lack of access to family practice providers. Could a contributing factor perhaps be that our medical community is fractured?
There has been an intentional effort in the past several years between medical organizations to collaborate for the benefit of patients and patients can sense when there is not exceptional continuity of care in our medical system.
Exceptional continuity of care can only be achieved when each medical community member focuses on what they do best and avoids fracturing the system further by diversifying into areas they lack expertise. Patients end up paying the price when the medical community becomes fractured.
Our Proposal: Hutchinson’s First Medical Provider Summit
PrairieStar is excited to invite both the medical community and our collective patients and prospective patients, to help address areas where the medical community is falling short.
While there is not currently a shortage of family practice providers in Hutchinson, wouldn’t it be a great situation for the medical community to find a way to earn the trust of those patients who are leaving our community to have their overall primary care and specialty needs met?
PrairieStar could provide specialty care, but we don’t. We could provide general surgical services, but we don’t. The Hutchinson Clinic, Summit, Hutchinson Regional, and PrairieStar all offer services grounded in their unique areas of expertise. And our focus in these areas results in optimum outcomes for patients. Delivering exceptional continuity of care demands we as a medical community focus on our strengths. When we do that, patients win.
This is why we are inviting both the community and our community healthcare providers to join us for the first-ever Hutchinson Healthcare Summit in the coming months. To ensure an accurate picture of patient life in the Hutchinson Healthcare system is gathered, we have committed to conducting a survey that asks our community about their experience. We will begin administering that survey through social media networks in the coming months. We will gladly provide the results of that survey to our community partners before our first-ever community healthcare summit.
In addition to ways for patients to provide feedback on the overall standard of care and continuity of care, they receive through an anonymous survey, this summit will provide an opportunity for each healthcare provider in our community to work creatively—together—to find areas where our community is not being served to the fullest potential by our existing healthcare infrastructure.
We are excited to find ways to encourage those 18-29-year-olds in our community to connect with a primary care provider so that they do not develop an increased need for more advanced medical attention in the future. We are excited about finding ways for expectant mothers who are patients at PrairieStar to return to their patient-centered medical home to continue care for themselves and their family.
Together we will earn back the trust of those who no longer opt to receive their care from one of the providers in the Hutchinson community.
Contact Information
For providers planning to attend the first annual healthcare summit, please complete the mailing subscription below so that we may stay in touch with you about the date and location(s) for this event. We promise to send no more than one email per month about the event through mass-email subscriptions. If you wish to communicate more about this event, and ways that we can work together to make the annual healthcare summit an event that truly benefits Hutchinson and surrounding areas, do not hesitate to communicate with either me at andersonb@prairiestarhealth.org or Ryan Corwin, Director of Marketing, at corwinr@prairiestarhealth.org.
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