Preferred Citation: Mullan, Fitzhugh, M.D. Big Doctoring in America: Profiles in Primary Care . Berkeley: University of California Press, c2002 2002. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt629020tn/
 | Big Doctoring in AmericaProfiles in Primary CareFitzhugh Mullan, M.D.Photographs by Iohn MosesUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSBerkeley • Los Angeles • LondonTHE MILBANK MEMORIAL FUNDNew York2002 |
[Dedication]
For Caroline
Preferred Citation: Mullan, Fitzhugh, M.D. Big Doctoring in America: Profiles in Primary Care . Berkeley: University of California Press, c2002 2002. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt629020tn/
[Dedication]
For Caroline
Contents
| Foreword | ix | |
| Introduction | xi | |
| 1. | Primary Care Roots | 1 |
| 2. | The New GPs: The Family Physician Comes of Age | 17 |
| EUGENE MCGREGOR, M.D.: A Legacy of General Practice | 20 | |
| CONNIE ADLER, M.D.: Living Rural Medicine | 29 | |
| NEIL CALMAN, M.D.: Urban Warrior | 38 | |
| 3. | Roots Rediscovered: The Internist and the Pediatrician as Generalists | 55 |
| BEACH CONGER, M.D.: Caretaker and Contrarian | 59 | |
| LINDA HEADRICK, M.D.: Seeking a Common Language in Primary Care | 74 | |
| SELMA DEITCH, M.D., M.P.H.: Children First | 83 | |
| 4. | The New Clinicians: Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants | 95 |
| THERESE HIDALGO, C.F.N.P.: Proud to Be a Nurse | 100 | |
| CARL TONEY, P.A.: Building a New Profession | 112 | |
| HOLLY GERLAUGH, F.N.P., P.A.-C.: A One-Woman Merger | 124 | |
― ― | ||
| 5. | The System Doctors: Managed Care and Primary Care | 135 |
| SAM HO, M.D.: Idealist, Innovator, Entrepreneur | 138 | |
| SALLYANN BOWMAN, M.D.: A Philadelphia Story | 149 | |
| GWEN WAGSTROM HALAAS, M.D., M.B.A.: Evidence-Based Doctoring | 165 | |
| 6. | The Quixote Factor: Generalists Doing Special Battle | 179 |
| WILLIAM KAPLA, M.D.: Life and Death in San Francisco | 180 | |
| BARBARA ROSS-LEE, D.O.: Ground Breaker | 193 | |
| JANELLE GOETCHEUS, M.D.: Doctor Succor | 207 | |
| 7. | Building a Better Future: The Case for Primary Care | 220 |
| Acknowledgments | 239 | |
| Notes | 243 | |
| Index | 247 |
Foreword
The Milbank Memorial Fund is an endowed national foundation that engages in nonpartisan analysis, study, research and communication on significant issues in health policy. The Fund makes available the results of its work in meetings with decision-makers, reports, articles, and books.
This is the fifth of the California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public. The publishing partnership between the Fund and the Press seeks to encourage the synthesis and communication of findings from research that could contribute to more effective health policy.
Fitzhugh Mullan uses the methods of oral history and personal journalism to humanize the phrases “primary care” and “medical generalism.” Mullan traveled the country to interview 74 primary care practitioners, the “big doctors” of his title (in contrast to specialists, whose knowledge is narrower and often focused on technology rather than patients). Most of these big doctors are family physicians, internists, or pediatricians. But Mullan also interviewed nurse practitioners and physician assistants. He transformed interviews with fifteen practitioners into first-person stories about their professional lives. Next he set these stories in context by adding opening and closing chapters and introducing each story. John Moses, a professional photographer as well as a primary care physician (as is Mullan), visited each of the practitioners to take the photographs in the book.
In the final chapter, “Building a Better Future: The Case for Primary Care,” Mullan describes policy that could enable more Americans to
Daniel M. Fox President
Samuel L. Milbank Chairman
Introduction
Big Doctoring is a book about the generalist in America, the practitioner of primary care medicine in the United States at the opening of the twenty-first century. Big doctoring is what the generalist does: doctoring that embraces the whole person, that values comprehensiveness and continuity, that welcomes the richness and the complexity of the complete human being. I set about writing this book because I am a primary care physician, a pediatrician, and I am, by turns, puzzled, fascinated, and troubled by what is happening to health care in this country.
I chose medicine as a career because, I realize now, I was drawn to big doctoring (though I would hardly have called it that in 1964 when I started medical school) by my father and grandfather. My father was a psychiatrist and a group therapist who invited me from an early age to sit in with him occasionally on counseling and therapy sessions with groups and even individuals. Though he was not a literal layeron of hands, I was fascinated by the breadth and intimacy of his work with people, by the privilege and the license that allowed him to explore and advise on all aspects of his patients' lives. He got to know his patients well, and I remember vividly how he came home, for better or for worse, full of their troubles. He worried about them as people, as complete, struggling human beings. My grandfather trained in medicine in the first years of the twentieth century and then spent thirty-five years as a Commissioned Officer in the United States Public Health Service. Although he worked in many parts of the United States, in Canada, and in Europe,
My instincts in medical school all ran toward big doctoring. The midsixties, however, was a time when medical education was moving briskly away from the generalist ideal based on the virtually unchallenged premise that the growing volume of science available to medicine meant that the future of medical practice was the specialist. The job of training programs was to produce specialists in increasing numbers and varieties. General practice as a calling was dying—faculty openly told us “no one from a decent medical school ever becomes a GP any more”—and the new model of family medicine had not yet been launched. So I chose pediatrics as my version of big doctoring, a discipline where I hoped that making a difference for a little person would over many years make a big difference. Pediatrics also meant engaging parents and families as well as the child, and had a rich tradition of work in schools and communities. After four years of residency at city hospitals in New York, I joined the National Health Service Corps—a brand-new program of the United States Public Health Service that sent doctors to poor and rural areas to work with people in need. I was assigned to a clinic in New Mexico, where for three years I practiced a mixture of pediatrics and, of necessity, family medicine. Although the time and the place were different, I did have a sense of following in my grandfather's footsteps, and I certainly had found my way to big doctoring.
In the mid-1970s, I moved to Washington and from 1977 to 1981 served as director of the National Health Service Corps, running, in essence, a 2,000-person national primary care practice. This was big doctoring heaven. By the early 1980s I was firmly committed to the Public Health Service and remained as a Commissioned Officer until 1995, managing a number of programs supportive of primary care education, research, and practice. From 1992 to 1994, I served on the Task Force on Health Care Reform and worked on the resultant Health Security Act that envisioned primary care as a central feature of a reformed system. But legislated health care reform did not come to pass. Instead, market-driven managed care swept across the country, rearranging the lives of doctors, patients, and hospitals. Most forms of managed care called on primary care physicians to serve as gatekeepers—a pivotal and controversial
In 1996, after more than twenty years in the United States Public Health Service, I left federal service intent on resuming my identity as a primary care doctor. I spent time retraining in pediatrics and went to work at a community health center in innercity Washington, D.C. More than this, though, I wanted to explore the evolving role of medical generalism in the United States. I wanted to bear witness to it, to understand its potentials and its debilities, and to provide testimony for it. Advocate I certainly was—and am—but I was acutely aware that this would be a tough task in contemporary America, a wealthy nation endowed with a powerful tradition of individualism and a strong sense of entitlement. These cultural realities, combined with the steady advances in clinical science, were serving to promote ever-higher popular expectations of the medical system and the common belief that pinpoint specialized interventions were the way of the future. In this environment, rich in transplant thinking and awash with anticipatory excitement about the Human Genome Project, primary care was seen by many as irrelevant or a remnant of the past.
AMERICAN MEDICAL QUANDARIES
The United States is mired in a profound, expensive, divisive, paradoxical medical swamp—and has been, with increasing malign consequences, for at least fifty years. Despite spending an average of $4,270 on medical care for every man, woman, and child in the United States each year—55 percent more than the next most munificent nation (Switzerland) and a full 3.4 percent more of our gross national product than the next most medically committed nation (Germany)[1]—we get undistinguished (some would argue terrible) results for our investment. A recent global comparison of health systems conducted by the World Health Organization rated the United States as number 37 overall, behind virtually all Western European nations, Canada, Colombia, and Morocco.[2] The U.S. system's levels of responsiveness as scored by the WHO did not offset its very low ratings on costs and fairness, confirming many transnational and domestic studies that document high degrees of frustration with the medical care in this country. Most troubling, the United States does not receive good outcomes for its prodigious expenditures,
The WHO document analyzes global data, but its findings are in no way contrary to multiple surveys, studies, and consensus documents published over the years in this country. Fifteen percent of our population has no health insurance. Infant mortality and longevity figures lag well behind countries that spend much less on health care but enjoy more comprehensive systems. In a businessdriven campaign to control medical costs, many whose insurance is provided through employers have been moved into systems of managed care, which many think limit patient choice and compromise quality. Despite this widespread phenomenon, medical costs are again rising, led by pharmaceuticals, which are now aggressively marketed to the public as well as to physicians. Medicare (government-mediated health insurance for the elderly) remains an extremely popular but expensive program that, despite its lack of coverage for drugs and nursing homes, is headed for insolvency in the future. Medical information is everywhere—in newspapers and magazines, and now on the Web—but the consumer, newly rich in data and opinion, has a new problem of sifting and evaluating this proliferation of advice. Despite the resplendency of our medical technology and the monumental outlay that we make for health care, we are not doing well in outcomes, satisfaction, or fairness.
A national primary care system of robust quality is a necessary prerequisite to draining our national health care swamp. This generalist ideal is a concept that flourished in earlier times, when, to be sure, medical knowledge was far more limited and an individual doctor could “own” a significant portion of it. The proliferation of knowledge in the twentieth century spawned and promoted specialism, but has led to the current situation in which specialty physicians in the United States outnumber generalists two to one, are paid at substantially higher rates, and enjoy far more prestige than their generalist colleagues. These circumstances and the general gusto with which American medicine has adopted the specialty ideal are at the heart of the quandary in which we find ourselves. Not coincidentally, primary care physicians play more central roles in virtually all of the national systems that rate ahead of the United States in satisfaction and quality. Quantities of evidence demonstrate the ability of generalist physicians to manage medical care more cost-effectively than highly compartmentalized specialists. Primary care must be the basis of any future strategy to extend care to all of the American population as well as all of the current “safety net” efforts to provide
Many questions came immediately to mind when I considered the status of big doctoring at the end of the twentieth century. The physician with a horse and buggy faithfully traveling the countryside to treat patients at all hours and in all seasons is a powerful but dated American image. The house call and the cradle-to-grave care are important national lore but these images, too, tend to come from the past. Marcus Welby was celebrated on TV, but that was forty years ago. Who are the generalists of today, women and men, rural and urban, physicians and, in fact, nonphysicians? How are they trained? What are their practices like? How do they balance their work and their personal lives? How do they see the changing medical world in which they live? How do patients regard them, given the specialist bent of our society? What do they think about managed care and their prominent role in it? How do they feel about keeping current given the continued growth of clinical science? What about the tedium of routine care and the hassle factor of dealing with a dizzying array of billing codes and insurance forms … and the future?
ORAL HISTORY
I needed a better understanding of the present and past before taking on the future. I wanted to understand how primary care practitioners viewed this tradition of doctoring, what these clinicians thought about their lives in medicine and their lives in general. So I set about talking to them, traveling the country and recording the oral histories of some seventy-four generalist practitioners—sixty-three primary care physicians, eight nurse practitioners, and three physician assistants. I identified and selected candidates for interview by a simple process of networking, starting with individuals I knew in various parts of the country and asking them who came to mind in response to the words “primary care,” “experienced,” “thoughtful,” “articulate,” and “colorful.” From there I followed my leads, trying to keep a balance with regard to geography, gender, urban and rural practices, ethnicity, and discipline as I went.
The path was rarely straight but always interesting. I had one New England candidate lined up for interviewing at a time when he was scheduled to go fishing and, he told me firmly, “Nothing interferes with my fishing.” When I asked him whom he might recommend, he thought for a moment and said, “I got it. Another old gopher just like me. I'm sure he'll have the time.” He did, and he had a wonderful story to tell. In another instance, I sat down to interview an internist recommended by a friend of a friend and discovered, part way through the session, that he and I had spent a week together in 1965 being trained in first aid and nonviolence by the Medical Committee for Human Rights before traveling to Mississippi as civil rights workers. My subjects (the word is unfairly and inaccurately impersonal) were extremely generous of their time and attentiveness, sometimes feeding me, housing me, and, on one occasion, flying me to my next interview. People told me their stories on rustic porches overlooking the Gastineau Channel in southern Alaska and on Maine's Penobscot Bay, in corporate boardrooms in Miami and Albuquerque, in a battered community health center in Washington, D.C., and in the magnificent National Academy of Sciences building a mile or two away in the same city. One interview had a forty-five-minute obstetrical delay while my subject plied her trade in a delivery room down the hall before she returned to telling me her story.
Oral history has been with us since humans began contemplating themselves and their origins. Tribal legend and family lore are special and common forms of oral history. More recently, and with the advent of recording equipment, oral history has become a form of documentation used by scholars to chronicle the perspectives of participants in epochal events—warriors, politicians, scientists. Social scientists and, increasingly, family members have used oral history to collect the stories and insights of citizens, community members, parents, and grandparents in an effort to capture and understand the immediate past.
I chose the oral history format because the intent of my interviews was to try to understand my subjects not just as physicians in the 1990s but as individuals who had grown up in the midst of the twentieth century, buffeted by the many winds blowing through American life and medical practice. I was especially interested in their values and the decisions that had drawn them into primary care. Where had those values come from, and how had they been formed, nurtured, rewarded, or disappointed? These questions have a relevance not only for understanding ourselves and our past but also for envisioning the future. The generalist of the new century will surely continue to provide day-to-day personal
Oral history is not just an open mike. The historian structures the conversation with the flow of questions and nudges the subject to get at frustrations and disappointments, which are generally much harder to learn about than passions and achievements. My interviews were as varied as the people were, but I always asked about the youth and background of the individual, especially about the decision to become a clinician and what prompted the choice of a career in primary care. We usually talked about the person's practice, social and community experience, and view of the present and future of health care. In the interviews I labored to get at what motivates these individuals, what they love and what troubles them about their life and their work. Most were marvelously open, talking to me with candor about their professional and at times their personal lives, sharing recollections, stories of youth, moments of pride, disappointments, hopes.
ORGANIZATION
Each oral history was transcribed, returned to the individual for editing, and revised accordingly. All of the transcripts were then deposited as the Primary Care Oral History Collection at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, for the use of future scholars as well as anyone interested in the history of medicine at the end of the twentieth century. In 1998 and1999, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published five pieces drawn from the oral history collection under the heading “Profiles in Primary Care.” For this series, I edited and condensed each profile so that it read as a miniautobiography, with the practitioner telling the story in his or her own voice. The core of Big Doctoring is the five JAMA profiles and ten more edited in a similar fashion to create a mosaic representation of the lives of generalist practitioners.
Each of the profiles is accompanied by a photographic portrait depicting the protagonist of that particular profile. These pictures were taken by John Moses, M.D., an accomplished documentary photographer and, as it happens, primary care pediatrician who is on the faculty
In rereading and selecting among the rich cache of human stories that I had collected, I discovered two unexpected characteristics of my “data.” The first was that my subjects were virtually all born before 1960 and most before 1950, meaning that I had not spent time with generalists in training or in their early years of practice. This bias came about because in my oral history mode I was looking for experience and perspective, which usually came from subjects who had been around for a while. The profiles in Big Doctoring, therefore, represent the end-of-the century generation of generalists, men and women who for the most part were trained in the 1960s and 1970s and who have been practicing since then—well versed in issues such as the escalation of medical costs, the uninsured, technological acceleration, and managed care. These are seasoned and opinionated commentators—veterans.
My second discovery, linked to the first, was that in my effort to find subjects with colorful stories to tell, I had managed to identify an extraordinary group of people who probably have more clinical, community, and professional involvements than the average generalist practitioner. These are unusually committed people whose stories go well beyond the typical and common issues of clinical medicine and practice management. They demonstrate an abundance of idealism, activism, and a willingness to deal with risk, adversity, diversity, and uncertainty. Their commitment to purpose and the vitality with which they approach their clinical and personal lives are evident. While it could be argued that the cast of Big Doctoring is not “typical,” these people represent the best values and instincts of clinicians drawn to big doctoring and the primary care movement.
While these fifteen lives make strong statements about primary care today, they are all set on the larger stage of the evolving history of medical care in America. To put them in context, it is important to understand the legacy of medical generalism as well as the particular organizational, economic, and policy issues that bear on primary care today. Big Doctoring opens with a chapter titled “Primary Care Roots” which discusses the values, mind set, and definition of primary care. It traces the history and emerging philosophy of medical generalism in twentieth-century America and brings the story to the present with the challenges and opportunities of today's complicated medical marketplace.
The profiles themselves raise questions about the future, with many
LANGUAGE
Throughout Big Doctoring, I use the terms “generalist” or “generalist physician” and “primary care,” “primary care provider,” or “primary care clinician” more or less interchangeably. I do this knowing that I am blurring certain professional lines of demarcation. There certainly are distinctions that can be drawn between these terms, and there are activities or clinicians that are typically designated by one or another of the labels. Generalism as a term has broad implications and links to concepts well beyond medicine and, as such, has particular importance to certain discussions, whereas primary care has a more specific applicability to health care and, therefore, a special role in other discussions. Yet the commonality of the work of generalist practitioners substantially outweighs the differences in nomenclature that complicate the domain of primary care, and the message of Big Doctoring is one of ecumenicism, not of schism. Therefore, at each opportunity I have attempted to choose the term that makes most substantive sense and avoids semantic awkwardness.
These linguistic issues are enriched and complicated by the arrival of clinicians from backgrounds other than medicine in the primary care sector—specifically, nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Nurses, in particular, have well-developed identities and a long tradition of nursing practice, so that their new presence in the realm of “medical practice” has created multiple challenges of language. Words such as “provider” and “clinician” have to some extent taken the place of “doctor” or “physician.” In some circles the very word “medical” is considered both exclusionary
In choosing the title Big Doctoring, I concede from the start that I am not going to try to force my view and experience with the world of primary care into a language that might be topical but does not talk to the public as a whole. The title “Big Providing,” for instance, simply didn't work. Throughout the book I have followed this same convention. I consider nurse practitioners and physician assistants core members of the primary care family, and my interviews and writings include them in significant numbers. But the work that they do falls under the banner of what for centuries society has considered to be doctoring. I have tended to use language that welcomes them to that role, in the spirit of collegial embrace and in the hopes of an increasingly unified world of big doctoring.
Some readers will undoubtedly raise questions about my selection of primary care disciplines. The boundaries of primary care are not uniformly defined, and there are many professional disciplines within health care that regularly or, on occasion, identify themselves as primary care providers. Common examples include obstetrician/gynecologists, dentists, and podiatrists. Others lay claim to practicing primary care under certain circumstances, such as oncologists who sometimes treat noncancerous conditions of cancer patients. While the contributions of these clinicians to the delivery of primary care is important, in Big Doctoring I chose to limit my interviews to five categories of health professionals whose educational programs are designed to prepare them to care for most of the problems that trouble most people most of the time and whose practices reflect that training. These are family physicians, general internists, general pediatricians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants.
It is my hope that Big Doctoring will help make the work of primary care more discernible to the public as a whole as well as to practitioners and students of medicine and the health professions. These lives tell a great deal about healers whose specialty is knowing and treating people over time and helping them navigate the opportunities and the hazards of an ever more complex health care system. Taken together, they make an eloquent case that primary care is a fascinating, important, and precious calling.
1. Primary Care Roots
Big Doctoring is about a way of medical life, an approach to health care and healing, a skill set, and a mind set that is called primary care. It is about doctoring that is humanist, comprehensive, efficient, and flexible, doctoring that builds on the legacy of the past and the rich tradition of care in medicine and nursing. To that it adds the science and technology of the contemporary world, applied in a measured, evidence-based, and coordinated fashion. In our current culture of medical care—noteworthy for its sophistication of technology, its inexorable cost increases, the absence of uniform access to its benefits, a high rate of medical errors, and the uncertainty of many outcomes—primary care provides a foundation for health care that blends good science with good judgment.
Yet primary care is not a philosophy or a vocational inclination shared by everybody in the healing sciences. In fact, for decades a tug-of-war has been taking place between advocates of generalist approaches to medical care and proponents of narrower, specialty-based philosophies. The fifteen primary care clinicians profiled here are men and women whose work is characterized by a broad approach to patient care and the community: they are practitioners of applied generalism, dedicated holists. Their work, however, takes place in the larger setting of the economics and politics of health care in the United States, and an understanding of this larger context is essential to any discussion of the present and future of primary care in the United States. The definition of primary care, its values, the role of generalism in contemporary life, and a review of
WHAT IS PRIMARY CARE?
Like the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile in Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, primary care means different things to different people. Unlike many elements of health care today, primary care is not defined by an organ system (cardiology), a place (the outpatient department), or a financial precept (capitation payment). It is an idea that, by turns, describes a type of practitioner, a domain of service, or a philosophy of care. This definitional ambiguity means that many roles can be ascribed to primary care, but it also can be an area of troublesome imprecision and confusion.
To clinicians primary care is a label that describes certain types of practitioners—even though no one is actually schooled or board-certified in a discipline called “primary care.” Family physician, pediatrician, internist, physician assistant, and nurse practitioner are the professions most often grouped under the heading of primary care, but on occasion many other medical and nonmedical specialties claim primary care status. To patients primary care can mean the provider (a word that is itself greeted with ambivalence) who knows them best, giving comprehensive, “high touch” care over the years. Or it can mean the designated medical grinch who bars their access to coveted specialty services. Payers and policymakers see primary care as a set of attributes and a level of care that promote the rational and costeffective delivery of medical services in a culture much given to unwarranted subspecialty care and the use of the hospital.
These definitions are further complicated by an important but largely unarticulated divergence of opinion about the ethos of primary care, about why primary care matters. Beyond its functional role, what is the moral role of primary care in society? Many proponents have seen the primary care movement as a battle for the soul of medicine. This struggle has been especially apparent in poor and rural communities that have been largely abandoned or neglected by contemporary medical practitioners and where primary care is viewed as a special mission to serve the underserved. In both mainstream and marginalized communities the role of primary care is seen as bringing competent, comprehensive doctoring to bear, healing in an omnibus sense. In this view, biopsychosocial skills are important, as are capabilities in areas as diverse as epidemiology, Spanish, community
Set against this is the “industrial efficiency” view that sees primary care as the foundation of all systems of health care. From this perspective, the primary care provider is simply the “field captain” best qualified to make sense of a complicated and often inefficient system. Not only can the primary care clinician treat the majority of the problems that patients bring to the medical system, but he can carry out well-informed triage for hospital and specialty referrals. It is this latter gatekeeping capability that has special appeal to the business-oriented values of health systems planners and insurers.[1]
Working in the midst of these competing and sometimes conflicting definitions, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences convened a panel in 1994 to deliberate on the future of primary care. That panel produced a working definition of primary care that has stood up well in the ensuing years and certainly captures the essence of primary care as it is being lived by the practitioners whose lives are documented here: “Primary care is the provision of integrated, accessible health care services by clinicians who are accountable for addressing a large majority of personal health care needs, developing a sustained partnership with patients and practicing in the context of family and community.”[2] Here I have limited my discussion of primary care to clinicians whose training and practice conforms most closely to this definition: general internists, general pediatricians, family physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners.
VALUES
The values of primary care have always been present in the medical care system under one label or another. These are the values of medical generalism (a term I use interchangeably with primary care), and they center on the treatment of the whole person with attention to his or her biology, psychology, and social and community situation. Primary care encompasses mental health, public health, and community health as well as personal health care. It involves both first-contact care and care that is given over time. Comprehensiveness, continuity, and coordination have always been associated with primary care practice, as have accessibility and accountability.[3] The proverbial horse and buggy, the home visit, the doctor who delivered the baby and treated grandma in her final illness,
The generalist approach to medical care is more than a tradition or a stylistic preference. Primary care brings benefit to both the care of the individual and to the health care system as a whole. From a personal perspective, “knowing a doctor who knows you” is a widely held value but one that can be hard to fulfill in a system dominated by specialists skilled in one organ system or another but who disavow responsibility beyond their own area of expertise. A friend recently discharged from a hospital stay captured this sentiment poignantly: “It would have been fine if I could have dropped my body off the way I do my car at the repair shop, and picked it up a week later. The problem was that I had to stay with my body, and that was awful. Nobody really took charge. Everybody took care of their own thing, and I was left ultimately to fend for myself. Whatever happened to doctoring?” A skilled clinician who values discussion, education, and prevention, and who can make referrals and provide insider advice on the system, is an asset to individuals and families. Finding and retaining a clinician with these qualities is not always easy, but few among us would question the value of having a proficient generalist as a personal physician.
Studies have documented time and again that systems of care based on the generalist model cost less, provide excellent quality, and have high levels of patient satisfaction.[4] In nations such as Canada and Great Britain, which have built their medical care systems on an explicit primary care model, health care systems enjoy higher levels of citizen satisfaction despite considerably smaller expenditures than in the United States.[5] Similarly, the health maintenance organization (HMO) movement, from its earliest manifestations in the 1930s to the present, has always held that strong primary care must be the basis of any sensible system of quality care.
Primary care has its detractors who argue that it is a bad idea or, at the most, a nice idea from the past that has diminishing relevance in the present and the future. This argument stems from the premise that doctoring today has emerged from centuries of practice that were based largely on tradition, personal belief, and hokum. Today's medicine is increasingly evidence-based and scientifically complex. This being the case,
This view is not wrong in its assessment of science or the challenges facing clinical medicine. Rather it is wrong in its assumptions about the human being. Despite the magnificent march of science, the human being remains a complex animal whose body and mind, self and family, person and community are linked in ways that will resist the effort to compartmentalize every pain or blemish as the domain of an expert but narrow specialist. Doctoring as serial specialty visits has not worked well in the past and, despite the onrush of specialized knowledge, will not work well in the future. The late Avedis Donabedian, the leading American scholar and proponent of quality measurement in health care, reflected this in a commentary about his final illness. Dr. Donabedian noted the irony in his need to coordinate much of his own care, observing that quality seemed to mean only “technical competence and, more recently, superficial attention to the interpersonal process. Keep the patient happy, be nice to the patient, call him Mr. or Mrs., remember his name. … Today people talk about patient autonomy but often it gets translated into patient abandonment.”[6] The increasing complexity of medical science, in fact, will create the need for more—not less—integrative medical care. To the traditional generalist values of comprehensiveness, continuity, and coordination will be added imperatives from the emerging system: interpretation, integration, and navigation.
GENERALISM IN HUMAN ENTERPRISE
Generalism as a phenomenon is not limited to medicine. To some extent, there is a competition in all human endeavor between the instinct to keep things whole, complete, and general, and the tendency to distinguish, sort, and reduce. The famous distinction between “lumpers” (those who prefer pulling things together) and “splitters” (those given to dividing things wherever possible) is evident in our daily lives. The way we organize our desks or our refrigerators, for instance, is subject to lumping and splitting
Generalism in human terms can be defined as a tendency to remain broadly focused, protean, and varied in worldview and activity. The generalist is interested in the big picture with all of its nuances, connections, and complexities. Generalism requires a willingness to think broadly and to maintain sets of knowledge and ideas that are disparate and often not mutually reinforcing. Since the generalist's domain is typically large and complex, it often lacks the certainty and predictability that typifies the world of the specialist. The generalist needs to have a reasonable tolerance for living with uncertainty.
Generalism in human enterprise and as an approach to professional life is vitally important to society as a whole. The generalist labors in broad areas of human endeavor that call for an integrator and a coordinator, someone who can see the big picture and work accordingly. In earlier times the generalist was the norm. The family farmer, the local school teacher, the owner of the general store, the lawyer, and the banker were all general practitioners. Over the past century, however, developments in transportation, communications, and information management have created an environment where vocational specialization is possible, useful, and encouraged. Consequently, most professions have shifted toward more specialized training and practice. The benefits of reductionism are apparent in the growing variety and sophistication of educational opportunities, choice of foods, and telephone service. The specialization of knowledge and the expansion of consumer services seem to go hand in hand and suggest an inevitability to the march of specialization.
The development of specialism is favored not only by the growth of technology but also by the universal desire for personal mastery. One is more likely to achieve proficiency and excellence if one can reduce one's task to the smallest and most specific elements possible. Labor efficiency likewise favors dividing tasks in such a way as to assure a high level of worker competence in a focused and repetitive area. Specialized training and experience tend to reinforce each other and assure efficient production from a compartmentalized work force. In short, reducing knowledge, information, and tasks to units that are as small and as specialized as possible addresses important needs of individuals and societies.
The very word “specialist” implies a superiority over the nonspecialist in the hierarchy of knowledge. The specialist, indeed, has often earned
And yet what is the evidence that specialty work is harder than generalist work? The specialist deals in a definitionally limited range of challenges. Teaching calculus involves a much narrower curriculum and a far more restricted set of issues than teaching arithmetic, social studies, science, and reading to eight-year-olds while simultaneously coping with classroom discipline and inquiring parents. The specialist in any field may deal with severe manifestations of problems, but the problems will have predictability and repetitiousness. If a problem falls outside the specialist's zone of competence, he refers it on. The generalist does not have that luxury; she starts with ownership of all of the problems that patients bring. Triage and referral are important roles for the generalist, but diagnosis and treatment come first. The elementary school teacher, the general dentist, the parish priest, the neighborhood police officer are examples of practicing generalists all of whom have training and capabilities that provide the basic foundation of much of societal life. Generalist practice is multifaceted, unpredictable, and often complicated, calling on skills drawn from various disciplines. Sorting and weighing problems, deciding on programs of action, and knowing when and how to refer (sending a student to special education, calling for police backup, referring to a psychiatrist) are important generalist skills, competencies of exquisite importance for effective human services, but that receive far less attention and approbation than finely honed skills in very limited areas of professional service.
Education is a domain in which these issues have a long history of debate. As young people progress through school, their education tends to move from the general toward the specific. Never again will students be as generalized as they are in, say, the sixth grade, when it is fair game for the teacher to ask questions about Egyptian history, the division of fractions, the chemical composition of salt, and the Spanish word for table.
The role of general education at the university level has been debated hard over the years. Should post-secondary education produce graduates with a broad exposure to knowledge and the ability to further educate themselves, or should it train individuals with specific vocational capabilities to assume places in the workforce? Although areas of concentration (“majors”) are the norm, virtually all American colleges mandate some quantity of general education—the dreaded language, or science, or humanities requirement. These requirements represent the educational establishment's effort to hold the line for generalism amid the ubiquitous and powerful pressures to specialize.
Similar tensions exist in business, with many executives building careers in one or another aspect of management—finance or human resources or communications—and climbing toward the top with little sense of the corporate whole. The organizational strategist Peter Senge opens his popular book The Fifth Discipline with the following: “From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole. When we then try to ‘see the big picture,’ we try to assemble the fragments in our minds, to list and organize all the pieces. … The task is futile—similar to trying to reassemble the fragments of a broken mirror to see a true reflection.”[7]
THE HISTORY OF PRIMARY CARE IN AMERICA
Throughout the twentieth century, the practice of medicine in the United States was marked by a struggle between the specialist and the generalist. Specialists have harvested the products of the rapid growth in science and technology over this period and put them to work in clinical practice. Although the practice of generalist physicians has likewise become more sophisticated, generalists have tended to labor in the backwash of the specialty surge, continuing to provide care to much of the population in a relatively uncelebrated fashion. While the first fifty years
When the twentieth century began, the vast majority of American physicians were general practitioners treating, as well as they could, all of the maladies that patients brought to their doorsteps. They were, perforce, generalists wrestling with the medical, surgical, obstetrical, and psychiatric problems of people young and old, urban and rural, well heeled and not-so-well heeled. By current standards their science was limited, but they were present in significant numbers throughout the country, accepting payments in cash and in kind for their labors.[8] The concept of specialties in medicine did not exist to any great extent in the nineteenth century. Although an occasional urban physician might achieve a reputation for expertise in one or another area of medical practice, formalized training beyond medical school did not really exist, and most doctors went to work as general practitioners on receipt of their diplomas. Rapid developments in medical science in the latter years of the nineteenth century, however, set the stage for dramatic changes in medical practice in the twentieth. Anesthesia, antisepsis, the germ theory of disease, and the development of the diagnostic X ray were among the most significant of these developments.
The formal differentiation of specialty practice began early in the twentieth century with the formation of the American College of Surgeons in 1913. Surgical leaders argued that the skills and techniques involved in surgery required special training and competencies different from those practiced by the general practitioner. Internists followed suit, forming the American College of Physicians in 1915. The course followed by most ensuing specialty groups was to establish a “college” or “academy” whose membership was limited to physicians who had received training in the field and who specialized in the area. In the 1930s board examinations were introduced as measures of special competence and as requirements for membership in specialty organizations.
The norm, nonetheless, remained the GP. In 1932 the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care, sitting as the first national body to study health care in the United States, concluded that “each patient would be primarily under the charge of the family practitioner … (and) … would look to his physician for guidance and counsel on health matters and ordinarily would receive attention from specialists when referred.”[9] Yet the
Between 1942 and 1954, the number of residency positions in the country jumped from 5,796 to 25,486, and the number of specialties grew to nineteen.[10] The majority of students graduating from medical school were choosing residency programs of three or more years that would qualify them to take specialty board exams. Those who entered practice as GPs after a single year of internship became the exception rather than the rule, and the GP was replaced as the principal provider of care for the family by various specialists, many of whom were hospital-based and none of whom treated the whole family. By 1960 specialists outnumbered generalists in practice.
The rebound of the generalist started in the 1950s with the idea that a generalist could be trained as a “specialist” with a broad set of competencies. In 1961, Kerr White published an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “The Ecology of Medical Care,” in which he used epidemiological analyses of patterns of medical care to show that in a population of 1,000 people, 250 would seek some form of medical care in the period of a month.[11] Of those, nine would be hospitalized, but only one in a university teaching center—and yet that setting was where virtually all of medical education took place. He argued that we needed to pay more heed to training of “primary physicians” who in fact worked where most medical care took place. This conclusion received concurrence from three national committees that were impaneled during the mid-1960s by leadership groups in medicine. The Coggeshall report (1965, the American Association of Colleges of Medicine), the Millis Commission report (1966, the American Medical Association), and the Willard Committee report (1966, the American Academy of General Practice) spoke variously about the need for reviving, defining, and upgrading the training and practice of the generalist physician.
The first substantive moves in the revitalization of the idea of a primary
The second phase of the generalist resurgence was the recognition in the 1970s that training programs in internal medicine and pediatrics had largely become way stations on the road to subspecialization. If generalism were to persist in medicine and pediatrics, attention and legitimacy would need to be given to generalist values and capabilities in these well-established disciplines. During the mid-1970s, the federal government, through its health professions funding (Title VII of the Public Health Service Act), and several private foundations—notably the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation—began providing explicit support of training programs in general pediatrics and general internal medicine.
The third phase of the new generalism was the emergence during the same period of two new, nonphysician disciplines in primary care—the nurse practitioner and the physician assistant. Jointly seen as additions to the medical workforce to deal with the widely perceived shortage of physicians, these two disciplines sprang from quite different roots.[13] The nurse practitioner discipline successfully tested the premise that nurses could be trained at an advanced level to take on certain diagnostic and treatment activities once held to be the exclusive domain of “medical practice.” The physician assistant idea was triggered by the return from Vietnam of military medical corpsmen who had rendered major medical care on their own but could find no employment or career tracks in civilian life. Federal Health Professions Act support was also important to the growth of these disciplines, which occurred slowly at first, but at an increasing rate in more recent years.
These achievements, however, did not mean that the generalist ideal was once again securely planted at the center of the health care system in the United States. The steady growth in specialty residency programs and the continued decline of the GP meant that generalists, outnumbered by specialists by about 1960, fell to 37 percent of physicians in 1970 and to just under 33 percent for the decade 1990–2000. The actual number
It was increased public debate about expense and inequity in the medical system that led to the health care reform movement of the early 1990s and provided new impetus for the generalist movement. The continued escalation of medical costs in the United States troubled both patients and the business community. The continued presence of a large uninsured population and, not insignificantly, poorer health indices than those of many other developed nations expanded the debate. Both in general public deliberations and in President Clinton's Health Care Reform Task Force, the importance of primary care as a foundation for cost-effective medical care received broad endorsement. Simultaneously, the growth of managed care in the country accelerated, stimulating the employment market for generalist providers and adding palpability to the pro–primary care policy arguments.
Suddenly, primary care was “in.” Medical student interest rose rapidly, hospitals and health systems competed to purchase primary care practices, and the number of nurse practitioner and physician assistant training programs grew quickly, with 58,500 N.P.s[15] and 40,000 P.A.s[16] estimated to be in practice by 2000. Some physician specialties reported difficulty finding positions for their recent trainees. Many specialists and their organizations began asserting that they in fact practiced primary care, in the hopes of favorable treatment in future compensation or training systems. The primary care provided by various specialists in the course of their practices was posited by some as a good strategy to meet care needs. Many specialties began to worry about competing with themselves and considered controlling their own numbers. For a moment, the generalist was in an unaccustomed position of approbation and demand.
The failure of President Clinton's health care reform legislation did not relieve the pressure for change in the system. The business community,
Ironically, then, the move to managed care in the United States made the “primary care provider” a much better known but also a much more controversial idea. The very success of primary care as a central player in the delivery of health care also burdened the concept with the problematic responsibility of cost containment. Medical student interest in primary care peaked in the late 1990s and started to decline.[17] Managed care plans began promoting options that allowed patients to circumvent primary care and go directly to specialists. Despite the two-to-one predominance
The managed care environment prompted changes in the way medicine was practiced in virtually all settings. Primary care providers, in particular, reported that they were required to see more patients per hour, per session, and per year, often for incomes that were falling. As with other physicians, the advent of prior approvals, specified formularies (limitations on drugs that could be prescribed), and practice profiling (computergenerated analyses and criticisms of physicians' prescribing and testordering habits) raised the hackles of many in primary care.
But managed care was not the only force creating uncertainty. The “hospitalist”—a physician caring only for hospitalized medical patients—emerged as a new player in the 1990s and was cautiously adopted by a growing number of institutions.[18] The hospitalist idea firmly divided the worlds of inpatient and outpatient medicine, aligning primary care with ambulatory care and inserting the hospitalist as a formalized practitioner of “secondary care.” From one perspective this change clarified and simplified the role of primary care, but it also impinged on continuity of care for those generalists with hospital as well as ambulatory practices. Hospitalists have made the argument that they are generalists in the hospital setting and that practice as a hospitalist is an opportunity for primary care practitioners. It is likely that the efficient division of labor inherent in the hospitalist idea will continue to prove attractive to some hospitals and that the concept is here to stay. Although it may be difficult to decide whether the hospitalist is “us” or “them” from a purely generalist point of view, most primary care physicians have adapted to the presence of hospitalists and find them to be an asset in patient care.[19]
One area of internal challenge for primary care is the increased clinical authority asserted within the field of nursing. Throughout the country nurses have been successful at amending state clinical practice acts to expand the scope of practice and prescriptive authorities, as well as direct compensation provisions for nurse practitioners (and physician assistants). Although this has led to increasing numbers of bush wars with state medical societies and the AMA, these legislative changes have enabled the increasing numbers of nurse practitioners (and physician assistants) to realize their clinical potential in a way that would never have been possible under the old statutes. In 1999, Dr. Mary Mundinger and associates at Columbia University published a study comparing the experiences of a group of patients whose primary care, including hospitalizations,
“Alternative medicine”—treatments from chiropractic to aroma therapy, from multivitamins to massage therapy, on which patients spend billions of dollars annually—emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as an important element of patient selfcare that variously perplexed, angered, and chastened physicians. The increased availability of information (good and bad) and ever growing patient expectations for desired outcomes have contributed to the growth of alternative medicine. Dissatisfaction with physicians and the often inscrutable, fragmented system has spurred it on as well. Here lies an important opportunity for primary care as custodian of the doctor-patient relationship. By attending to the frustrations of patients and by being generally versed in the more popular “alternatives,” the generalist can provide protection, instruction, and an affirmation of good doctoring.
While all of these recent developments challenge the field of primary care in one way or another, they all relate closely to it and derive credibility and energy from it. Primary care—how we care broadly for people and populations—is, in fact, at the center of many of the most important health and health policy debates of our time. As these controversies demonstrate, primary care enters the twenty-first century as an integral and important part of health care in America. Despite the unimaginable growth in medical science and technology that has taken place over the past hundred years and the inevitable demise of the GP, the offspring of general practice are well established today in medicine and in nursing. Within medical schools, primary care teaching is the basis on which all medical education is built. In policy deliberations, primary care is seen as the key to future strategies to provide service to the underserved and, ultimately, health care coverage to everyone in the country.
The men and women whose lives are chronicled in Big Doctoring in
2. The New GPs
The Family Physician Comes of Age
In 1940, three-quarters of America's physicians were still general practitioners. World War II provided a huge boost for specialization, as board-certified physicians received higher rank, more pay, and, in consequence, higher status in the military. Following the war, the G.I. Bill covered medical education, providing an instant subsidy for young doctors pursuing specialty training. The rapid development of employment-based health insurance in the postwar period also stimulated specialty practice by providing much of the population with a payment system for care that was increasingly procedure-oriented and hospital-based. By 1970 only 20 percent of America's physicians counted themselves as GPs.
Through much of this period the GP was a passive player, an increasingly rare victim of what many believed to be a kind of medical Darwinism—a species of practitioner no longer adapted to the world of medicine. The term GP had become a default definition, largely a role that characterized what a practitioner was not. Although the country doctor who took care of Granny and the baby still held a Norman Rockwell appeal, it was the specialist whose image was now celebrated. Facing dwindling numbers, the absence of residency training programs, and the prospect of the loss of hospital privileges, general practitioners began to organize, in 1947 founding the American Academy of General Practice (AAGP) dedicated to improving the fortunes of their discipline.
The next two decades engendered intense conceptual and political debate over general practice. What exactly was the GP of the future to be?
By the mid-1960s, there was general agreement that the idea of a formally trained family physician was a good one. In rapid succession over the next several years, the AMA approved a specialty board for Family Practice, the AAGP became the American Academy of Family Physicians, and family medicine residencies sprang up all over the country. The family practice curriculum maintained surgical and obstetrical training but emphasized the physician-patient relationship and the sociological elements of medical practice. In the 1970s, substantial federal support was provided to family practice residencies to assist in their startup and maintenance, resulting in growth from 150 programs early in that decade to more than 450 today. Between 10 and 15 percent of medical students choose to train in family medicine each year, making it among the most popular of residency programs. (For a more complete discussion of the history of general practice, see chapter 1.)
General practice has not so much been saved, as it has been reborn. The idea of family practice carries on the tradition of the GP but has a new identity of its own, a set of quantified capabilities, and a vision of the medical future. The continuity, nonetheless, between the GP of the past and the family physician of today provides a strong, clear, central legacy to primary care in America.
The story of Eugene McGregor, M.D., of Lisbon, New Hampshire, is a bridge back to the roots of family medicine. Having practiced for forty years in the community where he grew up, he is a reminder of the continuity and connectedness of the rural GP and the spiritual grounding for the family physician of today. Fifty miles to McGregor's west, Connie Adler, M.D., carries on his legacy, but from dramatically different conceptual roots. Urban, feminist, and consciously political in her upbringing, she has migrated to a rural family practice that picks up, in many ways, where the GP of the past left off. A residency-trained family physician, she exemplifies the same principles of continuity and availability practiced by McGregor and his colleagues.
Armed with the same values, Neil Calman, M.D., has reentered the city—in his case New York City—which, like so many areas, had seen the virtual demise of general practice. Using a blend of family physicians and nurse practitioners, Calman has constructed a network of family practice delivery sites that are active in training family physicians as well as delivering care in many poor and working-class neighborhoods. Wrestling with managed care, trade unions, and academic health centers, Calman has led a resurgence of urban general practice.
Eugene McGregor in front of his long-time home at 131 South Main Street in Lisbon, New Hampshire.
EUGENE McGREGOR, M.D.
A LEGACY OF GENERAL PRACTICE
Lisbon, New Hampshire
Gene McGregor was born in 1916, six years after Abraham Flexner, the great medical education reformer, published his critical report on the weak condition of medical education in the United States and three years after the founding of the first medical specialty organization, the American College of Surgeons. His life has spanned a period of enormous change in the theory and practice of medicine in the United States, most of which he has observed from the vantage point of Lisbon, New Hampshire—his birthplace and still the site of his medical practice. Spare of words and direct in response, Dr. McGregor displays an alertness and a power of recall that belie his more than eighty years. He sits comfortably on the porch of his green-shuttered white house on Main Street in Lisbon, recalling his days in practice, some fourteen thousand of them. He apologizes for the regular interruptions in his reflections caused by the gearing up of lumber trucks passing noisily out Main Street and by his occasional trips inside the house, necessitated, he explains, by diuretics.
He reminisces about life as a general practitioner in northern New England,
Dr. McGregor is no gypsy, having left northern New England only for two years of medical school and four years in the army. His lifelong practice in his hometown is atypical by today's patterns but represents a genre of traditional practice that is an important line of heredity to the values of current generalists. Continuity, community, intergenerational care, and home visits were all part of the work of Dr. McGregor. He never used a horse and buggy, but he is a bridge to those generations past, their fledgling science and their powerful art.
IN 1948 I CAME BACK to Lisbon, New Hampshire, the town where I was born, to start medical practice. I was getting older, and my children were getting older. A woman in Lisbon offered to lend me a sum of money to buy a house and to start a practice. I decided I'd better do it. I was going to be thirty-two that year, which I felt was too old. Lisbon had three doctors in the 1930s, but only Dr. Pickwick was left and he was getting older. This woman didn't like Dr. Pickwick very much. He was a very crusty character, and I'm sure they quarreled.
Coming home to start practice was nice and it was bad. It was nice because I knew the backgrounds of a great many of the people I saw, and I didn't have to spend a lot of time trying to figure them out. But I'd been away from Lisbon for fifteen years, and there was quite a turnover of people. I realized that I didn't really know as much about these people as I thought I did. Many of the names were familiar, but much of the social activities had changed during those fifteen years.
My parents were still living in Lisbon, and I think they were glad to have me home. My father had been a banker and my mother started as a schoolteacher, but later she stayed home to take care of the family. Both of their families came from this area. I had two great-uncles who were physicians, but the idea of becoming a doctor didn't really occur to me
When I graduated from high school in 1933, a lot of my classmates couldn't go to college because they couldn't afford to. I found that with the scholarship that Dartmouth offered, I could go there cheaper than I could go to the University of New Hampshire. Dartmouth also had a program that required only three years in college before starting medical school, so I entered Dartmouth in the fall of 1933. I worked all the time I was in college, and summers too. I “hopped” bells every summer at the Mountain View House, which was a big resort up in Whitefield. For those of us who worked, there wasn't much of a social life. The premedical curriculum was very much prescribed. We had only a few elective courses so I took history, which I enjoyed very much.
That was a tough time. I think the main worry was the question of war. There was a war in China at that time, a war in Ethiopia, and a war in Spain. A lot of people had to worry just about their existence. When you have 24 percent unemployment in this country, you're in trouble. For instance, my father's salary had been cut in half during the very first part of the Depression. He had some stock holdings, and they had become worthless. Even at that time, though, there was a great deal of wealth around Dartmouth, although I had very little contact with people who had much wealth until I reached medical school.
I applied and was accepted into the medical school at Dartmouth, probably because they wanted to encourage medicine among the residents of New Hampshire. I did have the idea then that I would be a general practitioner, but I didn't really know where. I do remember that I didn't want to be subservient to anyone if I could help it, except my patients maybe.
Medical school was very, very enjoyable. We had a class of twenty, and there were only two classes since it was just a two-year school. Dart-mouth did a deluxe job of teaching. We had some of the best teachers I ever had. In anatomy, there was a corpse for every two students. Spent all year working on it. It was a great time. I believe I am the only general practitioner from that class.
We all had to go on to another school for our clinical training after the two years at Dartmouth. I went to Rush Medical College in Chicago. At that time it was a part of the University of Chicago. It was quite an experience to go from Hanover to the west side of Chicago. I was in a class of 105 at Rush. There were eight or ten women in our class. I'm sure that out of our class of 105, probably 25 percent or 30 percent became general practitioners.
We were in the most impoverished part of Chicago. I'd never seen poverty such as that, not in New England, even at the worst of the Depression. I lived in the YMCA right across the park from Cook County Hospital. I used to walk in town every now and then, and I'd see fifteen or twenty drunks lying on the sidewalk near the entrance of rundown buildings. There were gangsters too. The Mafia was taking over restaurants, bombing and so forth. We were told when we were in obstetrics making home visits that we should never have more than a dollar in our pockets, and a dollar watch, because we might be robbed.
At that time, obstetrics for the poor in Chicago was practiced by the method of Dr. DeLee, I think it was, who established clinics for charitable delivery of obstetric services. The women came to the dispensary for their prenatal care, but when they delivered, they were delivered at home by teams of medical students. We went to tenements and apartment houses and followed the routine of trying to establish a somewhat sterile field with rolled-up newspapers, some hot water, and a pair of gloves. That was about it. The first time you went out, you went out with a student who had been out before, and he taught you what he knew. You could call an assistant resident from Presbyterian Hospital, who would come out and try to help you, but sometimes there were disasters. I had one, actually. A girl was pregnant with her first baby, which was in a posterior occiput position, and she couldn't deliver. Finally we got the assistant resident out, and he tried to put on forceps and rotate the head. I was giving her ether, which I had never done before, and I was scared to death. We were using the dining room table. Friends of the patient came in to hold her legs. One guy crawled under the table and vomited. I was running around the table trying to give ether, or holding up a leg. It was an awful mess. We got the baby out, but I'm not sure how well.
Most of the poor we dealt with were from all over Europe. At that time Chicago had the largest Czech population outside Czechoslovakia, the largest Polish population outside Poland, and so forth. And that was one of the reasons I didn't stay in Chicago, because I had to deal with
In general, Rush was excellent. We had some very good teachers, but the classes were big. The dispensary was excellent. Rush treated largely low-income patients for free. We worked on the wards at Cook County Hospital, where we really learned. We saw patients at Presbyterian Hospital too, but they were mostly private and we did less with them. I think the tuition was $400 a year. The school helped me a little and my parents chipped in. I borrowed some money, about $2,000 I think, while I was going to Rush.
When it came time to apply for internship, I wanted to come back to the Northeast. I went to Maine General Hospital in Portland partly because I wanted to get away from the foreign languages in Chicago. It was an eighteen-month rotating internship with no pay. Interns got room, board, and laundry, and that was all.
There were ten of us interns, and we were all as poor as church mice. We were on call every other night, every other weekend. I was only at Maine General for a year because the war came along. I had joined the Reserves and got called up in June 1941. I was married in May of that year, so it was kind of a busy time. I spent time in Panama toward the end of the war at Gorgas Hospital, a 1,000-bed hospital run by the Panama Railroad and staffed by the army. I was assigned to the contagious disease section, where I saw people with leprosy and typhoid fever. I did rotations on several other services and came home in December 1945.
When I was discharged from the service, I decided I needed more training, particularly in obstetrics, if I was going to be a general practitioner. So I returned to Maine General Hospital and started a surgical residency. I stayed for two years before deciding it was time to start my practice and to take the offer from the lady in Lisbon.
Getting the practice going in Lisbon turned out pretty well. I guess the fact that I probably had more training than almost any of the local doctors helped. Then, some people apparently didn't much like Dr. Pickwick, and they came to me right away. There was a woman doctor up the road who was getting along in age. I didn't know it at the time, but she was also becoming an alcoholic. As a result, I acquired practically all of her patients. I hired Miss Isabella Smith to do my bookwork, my laboratory work, and so forth. She was a graduate of Lisbon High School two years ahead of me and trained as a bacteriologist at Simmons College.
My wife, Phyllis, was a tremendous help to me in the practice right from the start. She was a nurse, and I would say that any general practice
I used the Littleton and Woodsville hospitals, both a bit of a distance and in different directions. It could be nerve-wracking, keeping everything covered. My wife used to have to come out and flag down my car at times to try to stop me, or she would leave messages. I used to call up the operator and tell her, “I'm going to Lyman today, and I'm going to stop and see so-and-so.” If she needed me she would call me. She'd track me down. It was great—far better than most answering services these days.
I made house calls all my life. I think that's the way medicine should be practiced. A doctor should be able to see people in their homes, to see what their hygiene is like, to look in the refrigerator. I probably made three or four house calls every day.
I used to try to get to the hospital by about nine o'clock so I didn't interfere with breakfast and the cleaning up of patients. Then I'd go to the other hospital, maybe make a house call or two. Then office hours in the afternoon. At first I had open office hours from about one until four, and then in the evening usually from seven until eight. In certain seasons, flu season, for example, the waiting room was packed, and other times I had nothing to do. Eventually I went from open office hours to scheduled appointments, sometime in the 1960s.
Lisbon has always been a pretty poor town. We had a woodworking mill and later a shoe factory, and during the last twenty years we have been making wire, at Lisbon Wire Works up the road. The mill did not offer any coverage, so people had to pay as best they could. Blue Cross came along in the 1950s, and I think probably 15 percent or 20 percent of my patients had it. By 1985, when I retired, maybe 75 percent of my patients had insurance, including Medicare and Medicaid. A lot were still not covered, though. Health insurance made a great improvement in many ways, but the whole thing became so complex, it drove me nuts. First of all, go back to the fifties. I can remember when I first began practice, I realized after a while that some of these patients owed me a fair amount of money, which they didn't bother to pay. I looked at their homes, and they would have TV at a time when I couldn't afford TV. So I remember I got pretty angry at one time, and I told Miss Smith to send the bills to a collector.
It didn't work worth a damn. I told her in 1960, “I'll be damned if I'm going to bother with that kind of stuff anymore,” and I didn't. She
As time went on, I was seeing a crosscut of patients from Lisbon and the surrounding towns too. Around 1956 a very well-trained surgeon named Harry McDade came to Littleton, and I realized immediately that it really was foolish of me to do surgery since he was here. I kept on with obstetrics, delivering babies until the middle seventies. At that time fetal monitoring came in and caused quite a commotion. It irked the hell out of me, and quite frankly I despised it. I gave up obstetrics about 1976.
When I retired on July 31, 1985, I tried to get someone to take over my practice. I even advertised. But no one was interested, so I simply closed it up. Eventually Littleton Hospital took over my old office and arranged for two Littleton physicians to use it on a part-time basis. Someone must be there about every day of the week. The office is being renovated and will be a satellite of Littleton Hospital. But I tell you, I don't like it. I think it's producing a nation of gypsy physicians. They go where the best money is, and they stay a short time. Then they're off and away.
I have seen general practice become family practice, and that's been for the good. When the American Academy of General Practice [now the American Academy of Family Physicians] was founded in 1947, I joined immediately and kept up. I thought it was an excellent thing. When I started practice, there wasn't this whole array of specialists. So as a result, you were forced to take everything on and try to do the best you could with it. The old-timers, if they had had a year's internship they were lucky. They had to learn on the job for the most part. I'm sure I did. These physicians had to learn a lot of things very quickly. Most of us were aimed at small towns and rural areas and were going to take care of everything. When I began I was probably taking care of 95 percent of everything that came along. A general practitioner today ought to be able to manage 85 percent of everyone he or she sees; the other 15 percent he probably ought not to be managing. The real question is to know who are the 15 percent you should refer.
As a general practitioner, you could experience some real problems, even when you were careful. A girl had a baby. After the baby was born, she came back to see me several times with minor complaints. I didn't think too much of it. Then she showed me some personal journals—just stream of consciousness stuff. I tried to encourage her; her husband was a minister. The next thing I knew she had taken the car and disappeared with the baby. Everyone was looking for her. She was eventually found
Over the years, of course, I dealt with a lot of family problems and the like. Drugs were practically a nonproblem when I first began practice. I don't think there were so many sexual problems either. I remember one patient telling me a problem she had of a sexual nature and how shocked I had been that she came out with it! At that time, I'm darn sure I didn't offer her any advice whatsoever. I occasionally saw women who had been beaten up by their husbands, and I would try to get them to prosecute, but they never would, even those who said they might.
There were a lot of other things in a small town that militated against this sort of thing. The Masons, for instance, the Boy Scouts, youth groups, religious groups, and so on, exerted quite a bit of power in getting kids not to do things that they ought not to be doing. In addition, the police were not inhibited by some of the things that have gone on in the courts. They had no compunction about beating somebody up if they felt he or she was doing wrong. They did. I think people knew it. If someone was to beat a child, for instance, the father or whoever did it could get one hell of a beating from the police.
Alcohol certainly was a problem. Even when drugs for the treatment of alcoholism came along, they didn't help much. As a matter of fact, years ago, in the fifties, one of my patients—a very wealthy woman—was a terrible alcoholic. She had married a guy who was a drunk himself. One night I was called to her house and found her standing in the middle of the room, not moving. “He's down there,” she said. “Who's down there?” “Louis is down there.” Turned out that her husband hid his liquor in the cellar. He had gone down to get some and she put the trapdoor down and was standing on it and wouldn't let him up. Well, now she wanted a drink. She tried to get me to get her riding boots, which were in a corner of the room; one boot had a bottle in it. Well, I was pretty irked, and I wouldn't do it. I think I just said, “You've got to let him out of there!” She eventually let him come up, and they were calm and peaceful and then had more drinks together, and I just left. I took care of her for many years after that. She caused a lot of commotion and kept on drinking.
I enjoyed my years in practice, but I wasn't sorry to get out when I did. The number one reason was the litigiousness of patients, physicians, everyone. It had gotten much worse over the years. The second reason
I'm glad I don't have to practice today because of the choices involved, the idea of joining an HMO or a PPO, particularly for a physician in a small town. Some of them want you to sign exclusive contracts. That would really pose a problem in a small town. How can a physician possibly function that way? I can see how an HMO can save money, but the only way to save money is if the physicians who are the gatekeepers are the most honest characters that have ever been created, and I don't believe they are.
I've been asked from time to time, “Isn't general practice boring, seeing the same thing all the time?” Actually I think it's the reverse. When I was a resident, I thought about going into urology. But the problem with urology was that I just couldn't believe that I would spend the rest of my life looking at penises and bladders and kidneys. In general practice, you're looking at a tremendous range of medical conditions. It's true that you can't have every bit of knowledge at the end of your fingertips, but you can find it relatively quickly. No, I thought that general practice gave far greater diversity and much more enjoyment. I saw eyes, I saw hearts, I did rectal examinations, I did feet. I pared corns and I delivered babies. Everything. The whole works.
Work as a general practitioner is not necessarily easy for your own family. Phyllis was a great help to me, and we had three wonderful children: Eugene, Jr., born in 1942, who is now a professor of political science at Indiana University; James G., born in 1947, who is a nuclear technician for a radiologist in St. Johnsbury, Vermont; and Kathryn, born in 1950, who is a Methodist minister in Colebrook, New Hampshire. I think my wife felt at times that it was all too much, because we were up all hours of the day and night, with deliveries particularly, and it was a very hectic schedule.
I probably didn't see my children as much as I might have. But I think my family would agree it's been a good life. I think about it a lot. I remember it well. But I am glad I retired.
Connie Adler with a new mother and child.
CONNIE ADLER, M.D.
LIVING RURAL MEDICINE
Farmington, Maine
Connie Adler quotes Marian Wright Edelman: “Service is the rent we pay for living.” And she means it. For twenty-five years she has been dedicated to the care of women—women and those important to them, children and families. Working in a free clinic and as a lay midwife in Seattle, Washington, in the early 1970s, she was caught up in the burgeoning women's movement and has never really left it. Her commitment carried her on to medical school, training as a family physician, five years of service in the National Health Service Corps in a migrant health clinic in eastern Washington, and now a family practice specializing in women's health in western Maine.
The daughter of a Jewish immigrant psychoanalyst and an Irish American mother, Dr. Adler grew up in an environment that valued intellectual achievement but discouraged women from entering medicine. It took a degree in history and ten years of vocational wandering before she found medicine and gravitated rapidly to family practice. Primary care was not valued at her research-intensive medical school in the mid-1980s, but with a few colleagues, including her soon-to-be husband, she
She is upbeat and loquacious in discussing her life and her work, chuckling easily and telling stories about herself. She understands what she has accomplished, and she describes it with clarity and a sense of continuing mission. Dressed in brown clogs and burgundy scrubs with her wedding ring and watch neatly pinned to her collar, she is at home in the obstetric suite of the Franklin Memorial Hospital in Farmington, ready to deliver one of the scores of infants she brings into the world each year. She pauses for forty-five minutes in her chat about her career, delivers a seven-pound infant to a sixteen-year-old girl, reflects on the challenges awaiting them both, and returns to her own story. She is never far from giving service to someone.
IN MY MID-TWENTIES IN the early 1970s, I was “called.” That was when I knew exactly what I wanted to be doing—working with women in labor and delivering babies. That was one of the clearest moments in my life, and since then I have known that's really where I belong.
I had moved to Seattle after college and was active in community organizing. I helped to start the Country Doctor Clinic, a collective that was one of the first community clinics in Seattle. A group of ten or so people got the clinic built and going. Then another woman, Margie Joy, and I started the prenatal clinic there. She was doing home deliveries, and I was helping and became sort of an apprentice. She was a lay midwife and had a physician for backup. I started doing deliveries, always with somebody else. The only ones I ever did by myself in those days were by accident when nobody else came out or got there on time. Within a year, though, I felt that I didn't want to be a part of doing what seemed like inadequate medicine to me, that if I was going to say I had some skills, I really needed to have them. And it wasn't enough to know one body system. Women would come in who were pregnant but who also had a sore throat or some other problem, and it just wasn't enough to know only the reproductive system. That's when I started thinking again about going back to school.
The other major and more important thing that happened during those years was that I had a baby. My daughter was born in 1973, and so of course I was involved with raising her. I was in a variety of different collectives at various times, but I did not have a partner. So I was single parenting. At that point came the beginning of a crackdown on lay midwives.
My father was a physician, but I don't think that had a lot to do with my decision about medicine. He escaped from Germany in 1937, a German Jew. The rest of his family was killed in the camps. My father was a product of European Jewish intellectual culture between the two world wars, and he brought this incredible Renaissance-man character to everything he did. He died recently, so I think about him a little bit more right now. He was a psychoanalyst trained in Austria, France, and Germany. He taught neuroanatomy in Turkey for a while. He actually practiced both neurology and psychiatry for a time, and then stopped doing neurology as he got older. During World War II he was in the U.S. Army, practicing largely as a neurologist.
My mother came from an Irish-English family that had been in New York for a century. An interesting combination. The two families would probably not have spoken to each other had my father's family survived, but it never was an issue. My parents shared their love of the arts and took us to the ballet or the opera or museums almost every weekend. Just as an interesting snapshot of my parents, when my father had three months off between when he was demobilized after the war and when he started practice again, he and my mother visited every church and museum in New York City. That's what they did with that time. That's who they were.
I grew up in Queens; later we moved to Upper Brookville on Long Island. My parents were Democrats, but not terribly political. From the time I was very young, justice was an overwhelmingly important concept for me. There certainly were things that promoted that feeling, including learning other languages. My father spoke eight languages, and we all started by age seven taking French lessons, and then, when I was thirteen, I went on my own to France for the summer. When I was fifteen, I went to Guatemala and learned Spanish, and later I went to Germany. Both learning languages and traveling to other countries were politicizing experiences. When I was in Guatemala, I witnessed incredible poverty next to incredible wealth. Guatemala has 95 percent illiteracy, and 5 percent of the people own 90 percent of the land: a tremendous eyeopener for a fifteen-year-old.
We grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood in Queens, which felt completely normal to me as a kid. Later I discovered that people didn't think that was normal. By the time I was in ninth grade, on Long Island, I was getting kicked out of class for being a Communist. During my high
I loved my science courses—except physics. We had aptitude tests. Each time I took one, people said I ought to become a doctor, and every time that happened, they also said, “But that's silly. You're a girl.” And so I went to college as a history major because it was “silly” for me to think about being a doctor, because I was a girl. That was 1965.
I went to Cornell and liked it a lot. I actually loved my history courses, American cultural and intellectual history. It was an exciting time with the antiwar movement and the black student takeover of the Student Union. Dan Berrigan was there; we had Seder with him. But then I went to Yale to do graduate work in history and just hated it. It was the beginning of the women's movement in New Haven, which I became involved in. Actually what I wanted to do was oral histories of women, especially women in the labor movement. The history department was very much Old Guard and thus a real conflict. I left after a semester, eventually moving to Seattle and getting involved in midwifery.
After Seattle, I came back east to start on my uncertain but determined journey to medical school. Women's health was my focus, my goal. The sixties and early seventies, of course, were a time when the women's movement was just taking off. I was a middle-class kid and hadn't suffered any horrible economic discrimination. But I knew from my own experiences the unequal position of women and the violence against us. I had already been involved in some antiviolence issues, violence against women, as well as the abortion issue. I ended up in Boston working different jobs, raising my daughter, taking premed courses. I remember sitting on the beach with my three-year-old so she could play in the water while I studied organic chemistry.
It was 1979—ten years after I graduated from Cornell—when I started Tufts Medical School. I was ten years older than almost everybody. The very first day I sat in class next to this kid who looked like a kid. I said something about my daughter, and he said, “Oh? What does your husband do?” And I said, “I'm not married.” And he said, “But I thought you said you had a daughter.” I felt like I had to explain to him that those two were not necessarily related. I met Mike Rowland, who is now my husband, in the first few weeks of medical school, and that actually helped quite a lot. We had each other to get through school. He was also an older student. He had taught high school in Maine and Vermont, and he was the one who first started talking to me about family
When I started in medicine, I assumed I was going to do obstetrics and gynecology. While learning the science of medicine, though, I became much more interested in how the art of medicine happens and felt that primary care was the way to go. Being there for the family as a unit was the way I could be there for people, and also help steer people in positive directions. But no one was teaching that at Tufts. In fact, both Mike and I got a lot of flak about wanting to do primary care. It was a very specialist-oriented kind of place. People kept saying things like, “Why do you want to be a family doctor? You're a smart person. You could do something really interesting.” But it became just clearer and clearer to me that the unifying of care made a lot of sense.
When I did OB, I felt that way even more. I love OB. It is still the thing I love most in medicine. There's something about that interaction of several hours of labor and coaching and birthing that's special and wonderful, but it's a lot more wonderful when it's somebody you've seen before and you will see later, seeing the child grow up, interacting with the mother throughout her life cycle, or throughout the child-raising years. I wanted to take care of that unit. The further I got into medical school, the clearer it became that I wanted to be able to take care of the whole life cycle. There were about five of our class of 150 who became family doctors.
Mike and I both received National Health Service Corps scholarships to get us through school. Mike needed the help and had planned on doing rural practice anyway, so it was up the right alley. For me, similarly, I was on my own with a child and had to find some way to support her. I really did not want to pile up big debts to influence how I practiced afterward, because I wanted to do shortage-area medicine. I felt that no matter where I went with the National Health Service Corps, I'd be doing shortage-area medicine. I never wanted to do suburban practice.
We had to do residencies before we started our payback practice. We chose the Maine-Dartmouth residency in Augusta because it was a good place—a great place—and we got them to agree to let us do it in four years instead of three because we had the new baby, as well as my eighth-grader. So we split our internship year. We alternated months: one month at home, one month at work. So we both did the internship year over two years. I loved it. We also chose the Maine-Dartmouth program because of the great people there and their attitudes. It was the only place
When we finished residency in 1987, Mike and I owed the National Health Corps four years. We liked the idea of working on the Zuni Indian reservation, but we ended up going to Moses Lake, which was a migrant farm worker site in eastern Washington. The practice was about 70 percent migrant farm workers, 30 percent indigent people from the area. Moses Lake is a town of about 15,000 to 25,000; depending on how big an area you count. We were the only two docs in the clinic when we got there, and there was one physician assistant. There had been two NHSC doctors there before who waved goodbye as we rode into town.
There we were. It was very busy, but the clinic was wonderful. The people who staffed the clinic are still very close friends, fabulous people, very committed. We worked in Spanish half or more of every day, which we enjoyed. It was a very busy obstetrics practice and a lot of pediatrics. The first year was like a fellowship in perinatology. We had a lot of highrisk OB, a lot of very sick babies, a lot of kids with congenital heart defects and congestive heart failure. There was a fifty-bed hospital in town where we did deliveries and hospitalizations. The hospital had a medical staff of about twenty-five; the others were all in private practice. So we took care of everybody who didn't have any money, and they took care of people who did. Some of the specialists supported us but we did almost everything for everybody. I had eight hemophiliacs in my practice, and in fact ended up being sort of the hemophilia expert in eastern Washington. There were several families where I was taking care of four generations of people.
We stayed in Moses Lake for five years. The first two years we were alternating call every other night—with each other! It was ghastly. We never saw each other. Basically the way to change that was to build the practice so we could hire somebody else, and we eventually did. We were seeing lots of patients, we were busy, we took all comers and built up
Moses Lake was a very, very conservative town. I was the only woman I knew who had kept my maiden name, and people gave me a lot of grief about it. It was an atmosphere that was stuck in the 1950s. People mostly identified by their church, and that's how they socialized, by church group. So we were almost never asked out because we didn't belong to any of the local churches. The Hispanic community was very open, and we went to lots of “balls” and parties with our patients and staff. But the Anglo community was not all that open to us, with the exception of the clinic staff and one very supportive obstetrician.
The high school was a trial for our older daughter. She didn't fit in very well in town either, but she ended up doing a lot of independent study. During her first week of school she came home in tears saying, “They have mandatory pep rallies here.” So there was some culture shock, but she got over it. She did well and went on to Columbia University.
At the end of five years, we decided to go back to Maine. We still had a lot of friends there and wanted to do rural shortage-area medicine. We chose Farmington because it has an excellent school system for our youngest daughter, with a lot of emphasis on music, which is her interest. I found two obstetricians here who were willing to let me do family practice and as much obstetrics as I wanted. We certainly saw a lot of communities where there were turf battles: the obstetricians didn't like family docs. I do primary care, but the three of us share call. I do my own C-sections, tubals, and D&Cs, and I share call with the obstetricians. I enjoy surgery and do a lot of it. I also share call with the pediatricians and do all of the pediatrics I want. People talk about a women's health care specialist, and I guess that's what I am, except I do a lot of pediatrics too. I was chief of staff last year at the hospital in Farmington. I get along with most of the specialists. People have idiosyncrasies, God knows, but there is not a lot of turf fighting here.
Farmington is an interesting community because it's very rural, but we do have a college, the University of Maine at Farmington, so there's some element of college professors and students. We have a lot of farmers and people who work in the woods. Maine is a poor rural state, with many folks who have nothing. There's a big ski area nearby, and there are yuppies who work there. It's an interesting cultural mix. Almost everybody
I hate private practice, except for being able to make decisions about my schedule. But I think it's a dumb way to do medicine. I hate doing the business part of private practice. I'm good at it, I'm doing fine. In OB, a lot of people become eligible for Medicaid, so the OB part tends to pay for itself. The folks we see in the office who can't pay, we write off. It all works out. We have some people who will pay over time, or pay with their services. I'm making a perfectly good living, got my kid through college. That's all I care about. I hate having to think about insurance companies and reimbursement problems. I would much rather be working in a community clinic.
I have been active in shelters and domestic violence work for almost twenty years. It has been very exciting in the past few years to see violence against women become more recognized as the tremendous medical problem that it is. Farmington has united in extraordinary and dynamic ways to combat violence against women, and I have found it challenging and affirming to be a part of that process. We now have universal screening in our emergency department and obstetrical department; more physician offices are screening for violence at office visits; and we have signs when you enter town on any road that say that Domestic Violence is a crime and will not be tolerated here.
As far as managed care goes, Maine is way behind the curve. We're probably ten years behind California. So a lot of it here is just speculation. I have a group of managed care patients in my practice. I have learned how to use that system and play the gatekeeper role. I think we are going to have to learn how to talk to each other better and manage patients on a community basis a whole lot better than we have in the past. There are a few specialists who do inappropriate things, and as a medical community we have to learn how to control that.
Right now I think we're going from point A to point B in the system as a whole, point A being this nonsystem of independent practice, B being managed care in some form. It's hard to get very excited about point B, but I think there's a point C. Point C will be a lot more involved in patient concerns—which have gotten lost in managed care—and involved in public health but incorporate a lot of the savings and organization of managed care. I think I won't be able to be involved in getting to point C if I'm not involved in getting to point B. I don't exactly see what the ultimate product is going to look like yet. I had assumed it would be a single-payer system. I was very excited about the Clinton health plan and
I do feel that I'm doing what I set out to do when I decided on medicine. I'm the only woman physician doing women's health in this rural area. The obstetricians are all men and so are most of the family docs. I have patients who are incest survivors, cult survivors, domestic violence survivors, and women with multiple personalities from childhood abuse. These are patients who really want to see a woman physician—and not just a doctor, but a doctor/mom. These are people of all ages. This is the need that I fill in this community. It's important to me to be of service.
I have lot of energy and a lot to give. I get enormous amounts back from my patients—some days. Other days it feels like all outgo, no input. But there are some very special moments with people, with their babies, with people who are dying, with teenagers taking on new tasks and figuring them out, that are rejuvenating, that give me as much energy back as I put into them. So it's very renewing. Not every day. There are days when I drag myself around because I've been up all night and can't figure out which end is up. But overall, it's tremendously rewarding. There's nothing I would rather be doing.
Neil Calman stresses a point.
NEIL CALMAN, M.D.
URBAN WARRIOR
New York, New York
Neil Calman stands in front of a battered Bronx tenement building, one foot up on its broken first step. There is graffiti on the wall behind him. His hands are in the pockets of his lab coat, and a stethoscope dangles from his neck. This picture, appearing in an article titled “The Urban Frontier,” tells a lot about Calman, his values, his strategies, and his chosen battleground. He calls himself “a flagwaving family physician” and “a warrior for urban health.” A third-generation New Yorker, he created the Institute for Urban Family Health almost twenty years ago and has run it as a command post for training and placing family physicians and nurse practitioners in community practices all over New York. Clippings from the New York Times, the Daily News, the American Academy of Family Physicians' Reporter, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Advances attest to the tenacity of his technique and the success of his public education campaign.
Calman's grandfather was something of an inspiration to him. An oral surgeon, an attorney, and a socialist alderman for the city of New York, he lived by his ideals and got arrested for them a number of times. Calman
I RUN THE INSTITUTE FOR Urban Family Health, a $20 million business with more than three hundred employees. But I haven't always been so comfortable with institutions. I was thrown out of the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, almost got bounced from medical school, and was suspended for two weeks from my residency program. Politics seemed to get me crosswise of administrations wherever I went. In 1983 I solved my rebel problem by building my own organization, which now enables me to practice many of the principles that got me in trouble when I was younger.
Growing up in New York, I couldn't help being exposed to a lot of politics and a fair amount of protest, too. I was born in New York City in 1949, the oldest of three and then later of five kids—my parents had two more children after I was already in college. When I was about four years old we moved across the George Washington Bridge from Washington Heights to Glen Rock, New Jersey. My father was drafted into the army about a year later, and we lived on a base in Virginia for two years before we returned to New Jersey for the rest of my childhood and adolescence.
Medicine runs in my family. My dad, who retired from practice in 1995, is an oral surgeon, as was his father. They both practiced in Washington Heights through the whole transition of that neighborhood from a mostly Jewish immigrant one to a mostly minority immigrant community today, and they worked out of the same office all those years. My dad now teaches at New York University Dental School.
My grandfather's plaque still hangs in my office. He was my inspiration and a very big influence in my life, passing on to me a passion for political causes. His name was Maurice Samuel Calman, and he was a socialist alderman in the city of New York as well as a dentist and an attorney. An alderman is equivalent to being a member of New York's City Council today. He also had a degree in agriculture, and he was a three-letter athlete in college. He had a philosophy about everything, and he lived by his ideals. As an alderman he was arrested a number of times. One of his arrests was for exposing a fake coal crisis. In the winter of 1918, companies were hoarding huge stockpiles of coal in outlying parts
My mother's father was a cantor from the same sort of socialist Jewish tradition. His were more cultural than religious values. He knew everybody that was half Jewish, a quarter, or an eighth Jewish—every entertainer, everybody.
My dad was associated with a small hospital, now torn down, called Jewish Memorial Hospital in Washington Heights. In my dad's day there was an oncologist-hematologist there named Harry Wallerstein who ran a small research laboratory with funds donated by the family of a leukemia victim he had cared for. Dr. Wallerstein allowed the children of hospital staff members to work in the lab during the summer. He literally closed the lab for those months to run his student program, and set up a group of experiments that we would study for weeks. I started working at the lab when I was fourteen, washing beakers and glassware for the first summer and progressing to handling mice the next summer. I learned a bit of biochemistry and became an expert in amino acid metabolism at age fifteen, because Dr. Wallerstein would insist that we learn the basic science behind the research we were doing. By the time I was eighteen, my senior year, I was the second-in-command of the lab's student programs. I don't think this program produced any work of major research significance, but it was responsible for many people going into medicine and assuming leadership positions.
In college I became involved in many political causes, a legacy from my father's father. In fact, when he died during my second year of college, it was a very difficult time for me. My interest in politics led me to the University of Chicago in 1967. An article in Life magazine in 1965 about the students forcing the school to deal with issues in the community really caught my attention. That was my first memory of having any kind of real political thought or interest. We could take courses there in any division of the school and we weren't even allowed to have a major until halfway through our third year. I took literature, poetry, music, and archaeology. It was a great educational environment.
At that time I became very interested in the social issues being discussed on campus, how the school was responding, and what role the students had. The university was like a white island on the mostly black south side of Chicago. The school wasn't integrated at all into the life of
During my second year I was involved in a sitin at the administra-tion building to protest the firing of an outspoken female professor. The school held hearings to determine how to punish us. At my hearing, I basically discussed the need to be true to your values and to act on them. Because I showed up for the hearing and went through the process, which a lot of people refused to do, I ended up only being suspended for the spring and summer quarters. About thirty students who didn't show up at all for their hearings were expelled from school. A number of them joined the Weather Underground. It was a hot time in Chicago.
I spent those two quarters living at home. I didn't want to get totally off track, so I went back to the research lab and talked to Harry Wallerstein. After he gave me a lecture about how stupid I'd been, he gave me a job. I went home and designed an experiment based on the research I had done there years before. Since the experiment was related to work the lab was doing and because Wallerstein believed in it, he spent about $10,000 on special equipment and supplies that I needed. I became totally engrossed in this project, putting in sixty, seventy hours a week at the research lab.
The experiment occupied the period of time that I was suspended from school, and we published four papers from it. I believe the papers were the only reason that I got into medical school. I applied to sixteen schools, but my transcript noted my suspension and I only got two interviews. In a complete quirk, one of the people who interviewed me had actually read one of the research papers I published, on how cancer cells changed their immunologic identity as they became resistant to chemotherapeutic agents over time, as he was doing research in an area very similar to mine.
So, I think I got into Rutgers Medical School for three reasons. First, there were two professors at Rutgers who were really furious about the homogeneity of the student body and the fact that the school was systematically eliminating people interested in political issues related to health care. The admissions committee allowed them to make recommendations for a few slots, and they chose me. Second, the doctor who interviewed me was interested in my research area. And third, the same interviewer was fascinated by my college course work in archaeology,
I really went to medical school to become a researcher. I believed that people with scientific minds had a responsibility to try to solve the big medical problems that people faced. This thought helped me to connect my sense of social responsibility with the fact that I was spending all my time in a lab.
When I landed in medical school, however, I quickly connected with about half a dozen people who were much more socially and politically aware than I had been. This group of medical students used to meet every week or two to discuss political issues in medicine. As I recall, they were very critical of my research interests because the research isolated me from patient care.
At the time my politics weren't well connected to my medicine, but that changed as clinical practice allowed me to integrate these two parts of my life. A pediatric faculty member who ran a free community clinic brought medical students to the clinic in the evenings to learn how to take blood pressures and gain real clinical experience. I went there with the other people in the discussion group and liked it tremendously. The first time, however, I was incredibly frustrated because I spent a whole night being totally unable to take a blood pressure. At the end of the night, one of my colleagues figured out that I was listening with the wrong side of my stethoscope bell.
During my first year of medical school, after I had worked in this neighborhood clinic for a while, I started to get interested in what health care was really about and joined a study group on health care issues. I did the readings and showed up at meetings, but I wasn't a leader. It was all I could do to hang on to the academics of medical school during my first two years because I was never particularly good at memorization. I always looked for logical associations between things, so memorizing the names of bones and veins and nerves was torture for me.
While I loved the clinical experience, I was bored in Piscataway, New Jersey, after the excitement of Chicago. At that time, Rutgers was just beginning to establish itself as a four-year medical school, so most of my class was encouraged to look for another place to finish our program. Leo Hennikoff, a pediatric cardiologist who was then a recruiter for Rush Medical College in Chicago and became Rush's president and chief executive,
Even so, I almost got thrown out of Rush, too; it is one of my claims to fame. My roommate and I joined a group called Concerned Medical Students at Rush, which started in 1972, a year before we came. The group members were more widely read than I was in political issues related to medicine, but I was very much in tune with them philosophically. In 1973 I became involved in opposing a plan put forth by the president of the hospital, James Campbell, to divide up the city of Chicago into health care districts. My recollection is that the plan showed great disfavor to poor innercity communities by sending anyone who couldn't afford to pay to Cook County Hospital rather than to Rush. It was great for Rush, but not, many people thought, for Chicago.
This was a major turning point for me at Rush. I was on my obgyn rotation and worked on two floors, one largely for paying, insured patients and another for the poor from the community. They were staffed differently and had different nursing models. One doctor was doing experiments on black women having caesarian sections without obtaining their consent. After giving an unnecessary general anesthetic, the staff would start taking blood samples before the baby was delivered. Besides the ethics of doing research without permission, the anesthesia increased the risk that the baby would be delivered sedated. I became concerned because we had been taught to deliver a baby as quickly as possible, so I asked the chairman of OB what was going on. In talking with one of the patients I also discovered that nobody had gotten her consent or advised her that she would be participating in these experiments.
The OB department refused to do anything about it. Another student and I copied a whole bunch of medical records of women involved in this study to show that there were no consent forms and that the delivery times after induction of anesthesia were between eight and twelve minutes when they should have been two or three minutes. When we took this information to the OB director and he refused to change the
Since the hospital had been caught in the wrong, they were not in a position to dismiss me, but I was in deep trouble for quite a while. Eventually, they set up their first human experimentation committee at the school in response to this issue and asked us to be on the committee. But inside the school it was clear we had crossed the line. The only thing that saved us was that we had documented every meeting we had with the hospital staff prior to going to the papers. Despite all this controversy, academically I did very well in my third year. Sometime around the end of my third year, when I had to start thinking about residencies, I found out about family practice. Rush didn't open this door to me, however, as there wasn't a single family physician at Rush at the time.
I got my first direct experience in family practice through an advertisement in the back of the New England Journal of Medicine, placed by the United Farm Workers [UFW] Health Clinics. A family doctor there, who'd been working in Delano, California, for years without a break, was interested in finding another doctor to come do a locum tenens. I called to find out more and he said, “Well, you have to go and meet with Cesar Chávez from the UFW and be indoctrinated into the union first. Then you can work in the center. Even though you are only a medical student, I have no help out here and we'd love to have you.”
After getting permission from the dean, I took two months off, got in my car, and drove to California. It was spring of 1974. I went first to a place called La Paz, headquarters for the UFW union, and got my indoctrination. Then I went out to Delano and lived in the emergency room of the UFW clinic there, sleeping on an emergency room cot for two months.
That, I think, was the single most important experience of my medical career because I learned how poorly the health care system met the needs of this community. We were taking care of people who had no health insurance and no access to the general health care system. They went to the health clinic and got whatever was available, or they got nothing. If they were brought by ambulance to Bakersfield hospital, thirty-five miles away, they could be seen as emergency patients, but they were unlikely to be admitted. If there were questions about their immigration
I took with me several lessons from that place. First, I developed the belief that people in medicine could do much more than just what is done in subspecialty areas. The medical world has this view which, I think, we've all become victim to over time, that you can't do anything unless you're a specialist. But the doctor and I did everything. We did our own lab work and X rays. He had a large number of books that we used to treat conditions usually covered by specialists. We also did complex suturing on some brutal farm wounds, as well as setting fractures and casting. We delivered probably twenty babies during the time I was there.
The doctor had a whole group of liberal-minded, caring specialists who made themselves available free of charge by telephone. So we did a lot of telephone consultations with people all over the state and, in some cases, outside the state, who were sympathetic to the farm workers' cause.
The second lesson I learned, which I recorded in my journal at that time, was that you can't separate the way people feel about their work and their family from their health care. The clinic was right there in the community where the people lived. The people who ran the clinic were enormously political. The clinic closed for half a day every week while we all went out marching through some town or grape fields. Only one of the nurses would stay to staff the emergency room. I've got pictures of myself carrying UFW flags and banners from the clinic through nearby farm towns, where people would cheer the clinic staff on. It was very clear that the health care we were rendering existed within this political context.
I headed back to Chicago for my final year knowing that I wanted to be a family doctor. On my way back east I visited some family practice residencies in Sacramento and San Francisco. Then I visited Montefiore Hospital in New York City, and found a couple of faculty people who were really tuned into the same connection I felt between politics and primary care. In the end I ended up entering Montefiore's third class of family practice residents.
It was at Montefiore that I discovered I had a knack for administration. I was one of three chief residents, and I loved setting agendas for meetings, taking minutes, and writing policies and procedures. A woman pediatrician there, Jo Ivey Boufford, became my model for administrative leadership. As director of the social medicine program, Jo ran a staff of very radical and independent physicians, all of whom were moving in
But I also remained active in politics, and I got thrown out of the residency program for about two weeks during my first year, in July 1976. The hospital workers' union 1199 went out on strike, and a group of residents and faculty people within the residency program in social medicine organized to support them. The 1199 strike was a bitter tenday strike, one of the longest struggles that 1199 had. Those of us who didn't have to go into the hospital went out on the picket line and refused to go to our elective rotations. This was my first experience with a labor movement struggle, and my grandfather's support of the labor movement was heavy on my mind. (My father reminds me that when my grandfather died, the gravediggers' union was on strike. Acting against the teachings of the Jewish religion, our family decided to put Grandpa Maurice's body in storage rather than hire scab gravediggers to bury him!) So I didn't cross the 1199 picket line then and have not done so since. The hospital president and some of the faculty members said, “If you don't show up, you're out.” That event dominated my life for about a year afterwards because we were all fired. Then the National Labor Relations Board came in, supported the faculty people that were fired, and forced the hospital to reinstate us. Thirty or forty other residents held a sympathy strike in the hospital to support our being rehired. We even received back pay and a public acknowledgement from the hospital that it had been wrong. It turned out that there were laws protecting people who supported others on strike, which the hospital had conveniently ignored.
Montefiore Hospital attracted a special cohort of independent and socially committed people and gave them opportunities to pursue some of their interests. So when they finished their three years of residency, instead of a traditional system where one comes out like processed cheese, some people actually had an opportunity to put their ideas into practice.
When I graduated from the residency, I knew I wanted a combined administrative and clinical job, so I worked with New York Medical College for two and half years running the Center for Comprehensive Health Practice, on the border of Yorkville and East Harlem. It was interesting—we had people who were poor and uninsured and people who had million-dollar-plus incomes, all coming to the same place for care. Administratively it was a disaster, though. Each of the providers saw six or seven
Because I was the only family doctor in the whole center, I was feeling a little isolated from what family medicine was about. I heard that they needed preceptors for a new family practice residency program affiliated with New York Medical College at Kingston Hospital, a hundred miles up the Hudson River from New York City. So every Friday for two years I drove two hours up to Kingston. The most important part of that activity for me was working closely with the head of the Mid-Hudson Consortium for the Development of Family Practice, Dr. David Mesches. He was a very entrepreneurial family doctor who had merged his private practice with those of a few other family docs and set up a family practice network, a department, and a residency program in the mid-Hudson area. He was bringing medical students up from New York Medical College to do rotations there. I was totally enthralled by the idea that he had set up a separate corporation and, in doing so, had gone from being an employee of a hospital to having an independent consortium of family practice people. He even went back and negotiated relationships with the hospitals as an independent entity. Hospitals were dying to attach themselves to him, even though the hospitals themselves would never want to do anything in family practice. I thought, “Wow, this is perfect for New York City.”
In 1981 I left the Center for Comprehensive Health Practice and became the founding medical director of Soundview Health Center in the southeast Bronx, a federally funded community health center in a Spanish and black community. The director, Pedro Espada, was a social worker in that community and later became a state senator in New York. He was a brilliant guy, also very entrepreneurial, who had a vision of what services he wanted to provide for the community.
It was my first foray into acting like a CEO. I managed the medical and administrative systems, put together the finance department, wrote computer programs for billing and other things, set up the clinical models, and created the charting systems. When I came, I was the only family
We developed a relationship with Bronx Lebanon Hospital Center, which wanted to develop stronger connections with community-based health care centers in order to increase loyalty, admissions, and specialty referrals. In my role as the medical director of Soundview, I went up to Bronx Lebanon and started a Department of Family Practice.
At Soundview I also wanted to establish a training program for students and residents, to help sustain the long-term interest of the doctors coming into the practice. Inpatient training was going to be at Bronx Lebanon and outpatient training at the Soundview Health Center, which would serve as the family practice center. But the community board and the executive director of Soundview, Pedro Espada, did not agree with our plan to turn the Soundview community health center into a training center. So we found ourselves recruiting residents without a family practice center in which to train them. That was how Bronx Lebanon became the recipient of a completely grantfunded new department and residency program. Fortunately they were thrilled, and agreed to clear out of an 8,000–square-foot ambulatory care center for us. We ran the residency program there for four years and then moved it to a beautiful new facility. Over time, almost the entire staff of family doctors from Soundview became the core staff of the new residency training program at Bronx Lebanon.
But none of us actually worked directly for Bronx Lebanon. About the time we made the transition to Bronx Lebanon, four of us decided to found the Institute for Urban Family Health, and basically modeled it after the Mid-Hudson Consortium concept of an independent corporation. We proposed to Bronx Lebanon that we would run the residency program under contract to the hospital. The hospital liked the fact that we proposed to run the program on the previous year's budget for the ambulatory care center. Bronx Lebanon gave us a contract, and we received $872,000 in twelve installments. We created the first model for continuity of care between outpatient and inpatient services by hospitalizing and caring for our own patients. Fifteen years ago, these were all new concepts.
The Institute for Urban Family Health represented for me the marriage of a personal issue and a professional philosophy. At that point I saw two choices in my life. One was to continue to be frustrated working for people who didn't move as fast as I did, and the other was to start my own company and gain independence. I'm a developer; that's what I love to do. The four institute founders became the board of directors of a nonprofit, taxexempt institute with a charitable purpose.
My professional philosophy destined the institute to be a not-for-profit. I describe it as a hybrid between a community health center and a private group practice. It extracts the best of both systems—we take care of uninsured and underserved people but retain our doctors by giving them a real decision-making role. I was sure that the way community health centers employed physicians in the 1970s and 1980s was wrong; they were treated just like clerks. My vision was to create a professional organization that could build on the entrepreneurial spirit of smart people with initiative to achieve our goal of taking care of people who hadn't gotten care before. We had no qualms about not being a community-based or community-controlled organization. We set our salaries according to what people were making in similar positions in the community.
Two months into the program, we heard that the Sidney Hillman Health Center, located off lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan's Garment District, which served the members of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, was going bankrupt. This center was supported by a trust fund that was losing a million dollars a year. There was $3.5 million left out of an original $15 million established just six years before. It was clear why they were losing all this money—they had thirty specialty physicians and not one primary care doctor. The specialists would come in and refer the union members to their private offices for surgeries that were covered by their catastrophic coverage. Practically every person that walked in the door ended up in a surgical room or getting an unnecessary procedure. The specialists charged the trust fund $100 an hour to come to the center and do this stuff.
It was the most atrocious health care system anybody could imagine. We called in an independent auditor and found that 78 percent of all of the services done the prior year were medically unnecessary. We proposed that they get rid of the thirty specialists and close their specialty centers—the same type of proposal we'd given Bronx Lebanon Hospital six months before. We offered to make the center financially solvent using just the amount of money lost over the past year and not another nickel.
We met all of our financial projections. I think we lost only $600,000 the first year and then broke even in the second year, two months earlier than expected. We closed down four of the six floors of the building, fired all the specialists, set up a panel of outside specialists we could trust, and brought in four family doctors to run the center. We took about two hundred patients off weekly allergy shots, some of whom had been getting them for twenty years. We opened up to the community, started working with Medicaid, and developed HMO contracts. The building filled up in five years, serving all sectors of the community. Now we have fifteen different programs run out of the building: for HIV patients, the homeless, and many other patients.
When we opened, the union had more than 15,000 members and a hundred shops, and now I think there are only two shops left. The union has shrunk to almost nothing because most clothing is imported now. We still care for the remaining union members, as well as the retirees and laid-off union members. But we guaranteed the union that, after the first year, they'd never have to touch the trust fund again, and they never did. We told them that no matter what the volume of services, we would never charge them more than the amount of interest on the trust fund. Since interest rates were high then, we received $300,000 or more a year from the trust fund interest. By the time interest rates fell and only $100,000 was coming in from the trust fund, the union membership had dropped too.
So, with the Sidney Hillman Center and Bronx Lebanon, the institute inherited two huge projects almost instantly. Then we created a third, a faculty development program. None of our core faculty of community-oriented family doctors had any experience in teaching, so we brought in outside consultants. On the advice of the Health Resources and Services Administration Bureau of Health Professions, the federal agency that provided the funding, we also included spaces for doctors from other family practice residency programs. About 140 people have come through this yearlong training program since it started. We've now started to do advanced faculty development that includes organizational development concepts, budgeting, and some managed care topics, as well as some continuing education for people who've been through the training before. And we have a training program for nurse practitioners, based on a collaborative practice model of how physicians and nurse practitioners should work together—a model very different from that popular in the 1980s.
About a year after we started these programs, we made a pitch to set
The Institute for Urban Family Health is really a business now. I don't think you can have a $20 million-a-year operation with three hundred–plus employees and not be a business. The institute now includes seven family practice centers, and nine part-time sites that cater solely to the needs of the homeless population. These last are run out of soup kitchens, churches, and shelters. While many homeless people are on Medicaid, and federal reimbursements are available for the rest, they don't have anywhere to go except emergency rooms. We provide them with a care system that doesn't depend just on insurance.
It's important to stay true to your commitment to the people you are out there to care for. We have had a number of opportunities to operate networks and primary care sites that cater totally to a commercially insured population, but we turned them down because they aren't consistent with our mission. As much as I've become entrepreneurial in trying to do new things, my colleagues don't let me stray very far from why they came here. In the end, we don't define our mission around insurance, we define it around people who have difficulty negotiating or gaining access to the current health care system in New York City. I think our mission is defined by our being “Ghostbusters” of a sort. If you need primary care and you have a population that's tough to serve, that's the kind of folks that we try to develop health care delivery models for.
We have totally integrated delivery systems for the care of HIV, for instance, because there are very few places where you can go for these services in New York that don't have AIDS or HIV written on the door. We have hundreds and hundreds of people with HIV at our sites, but they're sitting with everybody else, being taken care of by the same providers. We have two or three people who are real AIDS experts who help us provide quality care.
Through our relationship with the Visiting Nurse Service we deliver primary care to a group of about forty homebound people who cannot get in and out of where they live even with assistance. It's a small population,
We also have a program in the Bronx for people coming out of prison, many of whom have been diagnosed as HIV-positive. They have all kinds of other medical problems, and nobody wants to open their doors to them. So we transfer their medical records over after their release and begin caring for them.
I have been accused of being a flag-waving family physician, which I accept. We have one of the largest primary care organizations in the country that delivers care exclusively on a family practice model. It is based upon a singular philosophy that if somebody were to wipe out the current health care system in the United States and start over from scratch, they would create a front line that looks a lot like family practice and a back line comprised of subspecialists. The role of the primary care internist or pediatrician would not exist.
Nurse practitioners, physician assistants [P.A.s], and midwives are going to have an enormous new role in a managed care–dominant health system. People are concerned that the physician glut has eliminated the need for these “physician extenders.” But in the transition to managed care, I think we will all be depending a lot more on P.A.s and nurse practitioners, who will focus on doing the preventive and educational interventions that most physicians don't like to do. Nurse practitioners are much better at sitting down with people for forty-five minutes and teaching them how to use metered dose inhalers and nebulizers to treat asthma. Doctors usually just don't do this, although it makes a critical difference in whether or not somebody ends up in an emergency room or in the hospital.
Managed care, in my mind, is like nuclear energy. It can be a constructive or a destructive force, and it will always remain a little bit dangerous. On the constructive side, it's the first time we've had a financing mechanism that truly supports prevention, that recognizes that keeping people healthy is in an organization's financial interest as well as its philosophical interest. The entire financing system before was designed around illness and sickness to make money. I think that redesigning the system with the opposite incentives has more potential payoffs than problems.
The real danger is that we're designing a system that the American public doesn't yet understand. We're all familiar with being sold something we don't need, and that's the way the old health care system often worked. But the new system is like having prepaid insurance for your car; there's a danger that the garage mechanic will tell you not to worry
At the institute we're working to improve our medical records systems to keep pace with patient and practice needs for immediate information related to drug recalls and interactions. In the future, we will use the Medicaid managedcare company we started to help figure out how all these special-needs populations fit into managed care—HIV-positive patients, homeless people, and others, who will be the most vulnerable during the transition. I would like us to have a network of sites in each of the boroughs and in the neediest communities.
I would know my life was successful if a large number of people from very poor communities in New York City received care at our centers on a par with or better than that dispensed on Fifth Avenue. If we do this right, at least in certain model places, we're going to end up with a truly first-class system of care, serving the people who need it most. My job continues to be to fight the system, but now on behalf of an organization that is trying to serve those who are truly left by the wayside in our health care system. But now I also have to worry about meeting our payroll obligations, raising money for our work, and planning for a future in a health care environment being starved for resources.
I have always believed that one's professional life mirrors one's personal life, and my family life has been both a challenge and a blessing. My father provided stability to my family of origin, teaching by example the rewards of hard work and perseverance. He went to work six days a week and later recruited my mother to work in his office. My
My relationship with my wife, Renée, started in the midst of the 1199 strike in 1976. Her parents were also Holocaust survivors, and we shared many interests. Though she was nonpolitical, a fact that disturbed some of my more radical friends, she always supported me in my struggles with the system and, I think, was more afraid for me than she let on. We were to face many challenges together—first infertility, then the adoption of two boys, and, many years later, divorce. I often wonder if some of the same issues that caused me to challenge authority in my life and work didn't cause me problems as a parent and husband. I recognize that every human trait, like every new drug, has potential ill effects as well as benefits. What keeps me going is a belief that my shortcomings at home and at work are the results of the same traits that have driven me professionally to prove wrong all those who said that the centers we built and the doctors and nurses we trained and the models we created for innercity health were impossible to do. The remaining challenge is to be able to teach that perspective to my children.
3. Roots Rediscovered
The Internist and the Pediatrician as Generalists
The philosophical difference between “medicine” and “surgery” is a time-honored one. Surgeons have long been distinguished by their use of knives for manually removing disease from the body. In contrast, practitioners of medicine have relied on their powers of observation and analysis to make decisions about therapeutic interventions. Early in the twentieth century, as medical science progressed and the tendency toward specialty training and practice gained momentum, several important developments occurred. The first was the formalization of the distinct professional identities, organizations, and, eventually, certifications for medicine and surgery with the founding of the American College of Surgeons in 1913 and the American College of Physicians in 1915. Next was the emergence of pediatrics as a distinct discipline and its formal separation from the field of adult medicine (increasingly known as “internal medicine”) with the founding of the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1930. During this period increasing numbers of physicians were choosing to do nonsurgical postgraduate training as “internists” or pediatricians but with the principal intent of entering practice in the general care of adults or children.
Continued developments in medical science, however, created more and more clinical possibilities and stimulated the birth of a spate of sub-specialty fields rooted in the traditions of “medicine” but focused on specific organ systems and patients with diseases of those organs. By the 1970s, two-thirds of internists and one-third of pediatricians were training
Internal medicine and pediatrics were becoming holding companies of subspecialists who had divided up the body, organ by organ—all of whom were highly competent in their respective organ systems, but none of whom took responsibility for the human being as a whole. Questioning voices began to be heard, lamenting the balkanization of internal medicine and pediatrics and calling for the recapitalization of the idea of the “general” internist and the “general” pediatrician. As early as 1952, a group of pediatricians convened at the annual meeting of the pediatric academic organizations to discuss the state of teaching and practice in outpatient departments, the indisputable center of primary care pediatrics in training programs. In 1960 they formalized their group as the Association for Ambulatory Pediatric Services, stating that their goal was “to improve the teaching of general pediatrics, to improve services in general pediatrics and to affect public and government opinion regarding issues vital to teaching, research, and patient care in general pediatrics.” The organization, which was subsequently renamed the Ambulatory Pediatric Association (APA), has grown over the years and has continued to be a force for generalism in pediatric education, research, and practice. In addition to sponsoring an annual meeting, a journal, and a variety of regional programs, the group collaborates regularly with kindred organizations in internal medicine and family medicine.[1]
The challenge of supporting generalism in internal medicine was in some ways harder than in pediatrics—and in some ways easier. Because specialization was far more prevalent in medicine than in pediatrics, the challenge of organizing was more difficult. Without a real revitalization of the idea of adult primary care, it was altogether possible that internal medicine would become exclusively a land of specialties, with the residual generalists absorbed by family practice. The 1960s saw an increase in interest in the teaching of generalist principles in academically affiliated programs such as clinic-based teaching practices, neighborhood health centers, and area health education centers.
Increasing numbers of academic internists who embraced generalist values found that fields such as clinical epidemiology and health service research provided areas of scholarly pursuit that dovetailed with their generalist practices. In 1972 and again in 1976, Congress passed versions of the Health Professions Educational Assistance Act, which provided support for training programs in general internal medicine and general
The Society, which simplified its name to the Society for General Internal Medicine (SGIM) in 1987, has been a strong and articulate force for generalist values and careers in internal medicine. SGIM has supported federal generalist activities, including the founding and development of the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (now the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality) and has worked extensively with other groups such as the Primary Care Organizations Consortium and the Public Health Service Primary Care Policy Fellowship. Patient-centered medical care, evidence-based medicine, ethnic diversity, and cultural competence are among the values promoted by SGIM and the movement of general internists.
The line of demarcation between generalists and specialists in internal medicine and pediatrics is crossed frequently and argued about a great deal. All specialty internists and pediatricians have completed basic residencies in those fields. Many who have gone on to training in specialties continue to treat patients for ailments that fall outside their chosen domain and many, doubtless, do a reasonable job of it. Some specialists, of course, choose not to work outside their areas, and others are sufficiently out of date or out of practice that their competency is not what it should be. Debates continue about the division of labor between generalists and specialists and about the training requirements for both. These issues will not be decided easily or by fiat, but it is worth reflecting that the central issue is not one of simple skills but one of perspective. Generalism requires an attitude, an interest, a degree of patience, an element of human curiosity—a perspective—in addition to a set of special skills that cut across all of the specialties and enable a practitioner to reach out to the whole person. It is a vocation, not a subsidiary or passing occupation. It is an attitude of practice that goes back to the roots of the profession and to the roots of the individual practitioner.
Beach Conger, M.D., is a general internist in the heroic mode—a solo practitioner in a rural area, practicing a care-taking and individualized
Beach Conger engaging in spirited dialogue.
BEACH CONGER, M.D.
CARETAKER AND CONTRARIAN
Windsor, Vermont
Beach Conger started into medicine with an eye on public health. He worked in Mississippi as a medical civil rights worker, led a job action at the Boston City Hospital to improve patient care conditions, and spent two years as an epidemic intelligence officer for the Centers for Disease Control. Thirty years later, though, he is the quintessential personal physician, practicing in a small town in Vermont, watching illnesses come and go, families grow up, and the elderly pass on. When he finally began practicing medicine, it turned out that he loved it.
His vocation is internal medicine, but his avocation is professional contrarian. He enjoys gently telling people the truth about their health (some day they're going to die), the doctor (he doesn't know everything), and their part of the world (it has some strange medical habits). His handson engagement with life and his eye for the humorous started him writing, first a column for the local newspaper and then two books of auto-biographical musings. The cover of the first book, titled Bag Balm and Duct Tape, advertises itself as “How a doctor taught a town to be proper patients and how the patients taught the man to be a doctor.” The second
Conger counts himself an activist generalist who happily handled all manner of medical challenges that face a small-town physician. After adjusting to life in the country, he came to take pride in his ability to cope with most of the medical problems that came his way, calling on specialists only occasionally. But the environment is changing, and a determined generalist such as Conger is finding mounting pressures to join networks, to refer, and to rely on technology for diagnosis and treatment. “Today I feel more like an endangered species than a role model,” he observes. “Kind of like the gray wolf or the cougar. It seems my feeding grounds are gradually being replaced by multispecialty clinics and CAT scanners. Still,” he concludes, “I can't think of anything else I'd rather do.”
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN INTERESTED in public health. I used to think that I would wind up being the Surgeon General. Who wouldn't want to battle the scourges of history—tuberculosis, infant mortality, malnutrition? Medical school reinforced my interest. We studied salmonella outbreaks, cholera, and clean water strategies in the second-year epidemiology course, and I loved it. This was the era when we thought we had beaten infectious disease, before AIDS, before Legionnaire's disease and hantavirus and drugresistant TB. Smoking wasn't much of an issue then, and diet and exercise were still the concern of health food types. We had no idea how important public health would become to medicine and to all of us.
But it turns out that medicine involves a lot of acting, and I'm a bit of a ham. You can't crack jokes when you're trying to solve the problem of infant mortality, but I can with my patients. I have spent time working in public health. I enjoy the problem solving and dealing with public issues like access to health care, abortion, and prevention. I've been active in local politics and, for a while, served as chairman of my local school board. But it turns out that for me it isn't as much fun as the one-to-one with patients. As things have developed, I'm a country doctor, not the Surgeon General—and I love it.
I started in the city. I was born in 1941 in New York City but was raised in suburban New York, first in Hastings-on-Hudson, and then in Pleasantville, a suburb about thirty miles outside New York City that is known as the home of the Reader's Digest. My parents were both writers.
Pleasantville was your basic town, all that its name implies. In the 1940s it had about 5,000 people and was just far enough out that most people who lived there did not commute to New York City. We had one African American in town. His name was Sidney Poitier. I went to a small high school, where about 40 percent of the kids went on to college. They tended to be the ones from educated families who worked in New York City.
My decision to become a doctor was basically the result of my doing well in school; that was one of the things that kids who did well in school then were supposed to do. I went to Amherst College, where I majored in Russian and traveled to Russia in 1962. I thought it would be more interesting to become a Russian scholar than a doctor, but I couldn't see far enough on the horizon in that field, whereas medical school was pretty clear.
I went to medical school at Harvard. I found the first two years tedious, and I didn't apply myself much. I'm not good at compulsive learning, so if it wasn't interesting I tended not to study it, with the result that I didn't do very well. One day after I got a D in physiology, I was called into the dean's office. Since you've been accepted to Harvard they assume you're smart, so if you're not doing well they think you're having some problem at home. Just before entering medical school I had married. The dean asked me if my home life was happy. I replied, “Yes, I think that's fine.” After that I realized it was in my interest to have been a little bit unhappy, otherwise they thought there was something wrong with me. The second two years were better. I enjoyed the practical stuff.
During my junior year I did my medicine rotation at Boston City Hospital, which I loved. A city hospital setting is much more egalitarian than places like the Massachusetts General and the Brigham Hospitals [now the Brigham and Women's Hospital]. It's much more forgiving, both in terms of what the patients expect from you and the way people treat each other. I did my medicine and surgery rotations there, as well as my internship and residency.
Between my second and third years of medical school, in the summer of 1965, I went to Mississippi. Jack Geiger, one of the leading spokes-men for the Medical Committee for Human Rights, gave a talk in Boston. As a newspaperman turned doctor, he envisioned health care as an instrument to raise people out of poverty. This appealed to my public health instincts. Geiger was very charismatic. He'd gotten a grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity to set up a clinic in Holmes County, Mississippi, and he was looking for summer volunteers to go south. I signed on.
After a week of training at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, they sent me to Holmes County. My wife, who was similarly politically inclined, was teaching math that summer at Tougaloo University in Jackson, Mississippi. I wound up living in the house of a sharecropping family that was about five miles outside the county seat, Lexington, Mississippi. I was full of grandiose concepts about what I was going to do as a medical civil rights worker but I wound up working on voter registration and school integration—not the stuff of medicine but historic movements of the time. It was a remarkable experience.
The one medical experience I had was being called to the home of a child who was lying on a bed seizing. At that point, I probably knew something about the idea that children may have febrile seizures, but that's about it. “We'll have to take him to the hospital. This is terrible,” I said. The mother put him on the floor so he wouldn't hurt himself. “It's just a seizure,” she said. “And besides, they won't see us at the hospital.” I was horrified. I assumed that something drastic was going to happen to the child if they didn't get him to the hospital, and the family accepted it. They thought I might have a pill I could give the child. They never asked me anything again.
For my wife and me—as for many others who went south to work in the Civil Rights Movement—the experience was a politicizing one. Once back in Boston, we decided that we wanted to be active in local politics, so we moved into the Cabot Street Housing Project in Roxbury. We were the only white couple living there. The rent was $44 a month, which was a nice benefit, and my wife served on the board of the local Community Action Agency. I worked on the Boston arm of Dr. Geiger's project, which was opening a clinic in the impoverished Columbia Point section of the city.
Living in the ghetto at that time was very different than it would be today. People used drugs and alcohol and fell asleep on the sidewalks,
When I was a fourth-year medical student I still didn't know much, but I came and went in a white coat. My neighbor was a taxicab driver. One day, his wife came over to see me and said, “You've got to see my husband. He needs to go to the hospital and he won't go.” So I went over. He was sitting watching television with a Band-Aid on his forehead. “What's the matter?” I asked.
He said, “I've got a headache.”
Being a dutiful medical student, I began asking him a recently learned list of questions about a headache. “When did it start? Did it come on suddenly or gradually? Does it radiate, or do you feel sick to your stomach?” We didn't know each other very well, but I think he figured this was something he had to go through. Then I asked, “What's the Band-Aid for?” I thought it was some kind of funny thing he did to make him feel better. So he took it off and said, “That's the bullet hole.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I was driving my taxi and I went to let my fare out, and the guy put a gun to my head and said, ‘Give me your money or I'm going to shoot you.’ And I said no, so he shot me.”
“He shot you in the head?”
“Yeah.”
“With a bullet?”
“Yeah.”
I said, “You've got to go to the hospital! You've been shot in the head!”
And his wife said to him, “See, I told you he'd say that. Listen to the doctor.”
He says, “No, if I go down there, I'll sit around for five hours, they'll take an X ray, they'll say there's nothing they can do, and they'll send me home again.”
I said, “No, no, no. You've been shot in the head. I'll call an ambulance.”
He said, “I'm not going to take an ambulance.”
He went to Boston City. Five, six, seven hours later, he comes back. “What happened?” I asked.
“They took an X ray, they said there's nothing they could do, and they sent me home.”
So now, whenever anyone comes in for a headache, the first thing I ask them is if anybody shot them.
We lived in the project for the last two years of medical school and into my internship. My son was born while we lived there. We moved out of the housing project because we were no longer economically eligible after I began to make a salary. Because of my background, living in Roxbury provided me with a perspective I hadn't had. It gave me an understanding that, even in this country, there is a way of life that has nothing to do with what goes on in places like Pleasantville, where I grew up, or Vermont, where I have lived since 1977.
Going to Mississippi and practicing at Boston City Hospital were conscious decisions I made to work with people who were poor. Working with the poor was more rewarding for me. I was not comfortable as a student at Boston's upscale hospitals. I didn't feel smart compared to the doctors there, but also those hospitals seemed a little too classy, too detached. The Shah of Iran was a patient at the Mass General when I was there. That wasn't why I was in medicine. In contrast, I felt at home at Boston City Hospital, which was falling apart.
In 1967, while I was a fourth-year student at Boston City Hospital, we held a “heal-in” to protest conditions at the hospital. The heal-in was an alternative to a strike where we continued to admit patients but didn't discharge anyone. Interns were paid only $100 a month and wanted a raise. We also wanted better laboratory services, more nursing, and improved patient care all around. The city said, in essence, “Listen, we'll give you pay increases and some lab technicians, but we're not going to address nursing and patient care. We don't have control over that. If you fight this, you may not get the money you want.” The house officers were getting tired of the heal-in, so we settled for our money and the promise that they were going to work on our other demands.
In 1968 I became president of the house officers' association, and we became the first labor organization of house officers in the country, although I didn't find that out until I attended our thirtieth anniversary this past year in Boston. We hired a lawyer and, full of righteous zeal, we sat down to finish the business of improving patient care. At the time I felt I had really accomplished something. Now, years later, I am ashamed. The real tragedy of Boston was not how they treated the house officers, who would soon go on to rich and prosperous careers, but how they treated the poor people of the city of Boston and the health care
I was at Boston City Hospital for two years, then I joined the Public Health Service and was assigned to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta in a special program called the Epidemic Intelligence Service. Practicing public health appealed to me, especially given the choice of going to Vietnam or an assignment in the Public Health Service. My intent was to stay in the Public Health Service permanently, and the time I spent at the CDC substantially raised my estimation of the federal government. The dedication of some medical staff at the CDC was improved by the sense that if they weren't at the CDC somebody would be glad to take their places, and they could always be sent to Vietnam as medical officers.
This was pure public health work in a public health agency, and I liked it a lot. When I began, the entire focus of the CDC was infectious disease, but they were at the point of applying epidemiological principles to other aspects of health. I went to work with a gynecologist who was beginning a program of contraceptive evaluation using data from family planning clinics. I staffed rural health clinics in southern Georgia, where the local doctors, who were all white, wouldn't go, because public health clinics were believed to be a Communist plot. I traveled to these clinics, where a very pleasant, condescending white nurse would usher in her black clients, whose faces I would never see. When I would come into the room they were already in the stirrups, covered with a sheet, draped around so that it was physically difficult for me to talk to them, which was intentional. I would be either checking an IUD, or putting an IUD in. That was what these clinics were doing.
In 1970 New York state passed a law legalizing abortions, and I was sent there in 1971 by the CDC to conduct surveillance of outpatient abortions in New York City, tracking down complications and deaths. People came to New York from all over the country to get abortions, so it was really a national issue. For the first time the CDC recognized that the morbidity from abortions needed to be treated on a par with tracking down salmonella outbreaks and eradicating smallpox. Abortions had finally become part of the mainstream political debate in this country. This was 1969 and 1970, long before AIDS arrived on the scene.
We were still based in Atlanta, and we had had our fill of the South. My wife was involved in a class action suit against AT&T because she was one of many women who were being paid less than their male counterparts.
The clinic, called the South of Market Health Center, was just off Mission Street, smack in an area of dilapidated housing, soup kitchens, and rundown hotels. We saw people on a first-come, first-served basis and, often when I arrived in the morning, I would see my patients sleeping on the sidewalk, waiting to get in. Medical care at the clinic had been terrible before we started—Vitamin B-12 shots and antibiotics for everything. We came in with new money, new employees, and outreach programs. We treated patients with respect, practiced preventive medicine, and went door to door. Besides homeless alcoholics and heroin addicts, there was also a large immigrant Filipino population living in the same area who, in contrast, were very stable and upwardly mobile. Many had come from the upper classes in the Philippines, including some doctors who were working as housekeepers. Tension existed between these two populations over the clinic. The Filipinos wanted it to be their clinic, and after a while many of them joined the clinic staff. The alcoholics then tended not to show up as much.
I worked there for six years and discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that I liked practicing medicine. Although public health planning had been a lot of fun, I really enjoyed patients. At that time, of course, I had the illusion that you could do both population medicine and clinical medicine. I was no longer planning to become Surgeon General. But if someone said, “Would you want to become director of the city's health clinics, at some point?” I might have said yes. This was an activist time in San Francisco with many free clinics and a lot of federal money available to set up neighborhood health centers. The budget for our clinic doubled about every two years.
By 1977 I'd gotten an amicable divorce and married Trine Boh, who was a first year law student at Golden Gate University. My focus changed
The doctor who was leaving told me, “Oh, you don't want to come here. There are no patients to see.” I thought, “Why not? They're going to guarantee my salary, and I can do this for two years. In the mean-time, we'll figure out what we're really going to do.” That was nineteen years ago.
For the first six months I was petrified, because I was used to places where there was always somebody around to help you deal with a problem. If somebody got sick, I sent them to the hospital. I might visit them, but I didn't start the IVs, insert tracheal tubes, put casts on people. I prescribed drugs, and I talked. Suddenly I was dealing with everything—train wrecks and broken wrists, things I'd seen a hundred times and things I'd never seen before. I was the doctor. There were no diagnostic radiologists, no backup orthopedic surgeons, no backup anything. It was anxiety-provoking.
And then I got used to it, and realized that you do what you can do. For instance, I was treating a man with chest pain. I don't remember what went wrong, but he died suddenly. I told the family I felt just awful, and they could see it. “Doc, don't feel bad,” they said. “You did the best you could. He would have died anyway.” They were understanding of the idea that doctors don't always succeed. People in Windsor back then accepted the idea that doctors could fail or even screw up.
An example of the kind of thing I had to learn on the spot was caring for a patient with a fracture. In all my years of medical training, I was never taught how to place a cast. Internists didn't do that in city hospitals. When I worked in the emergency room at Boston City Hospital,
There were a lot of things I just gradually started doing. I practiced more intense medicine than many internists do today, largely because people expected me to. I referred very few patients out unless they needed a surgical consultation.
We now have six internists in Windsor, two pediatricians, a general surgeon, a full-time orthopedic surgeon, and a variety of visiting specialists. The specialists visit from the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center twenty miles to the north, or they've set up a private practice in which they circuitride to a series of community hospitals, of which we remain the smallest. So specialists are all around me again. Patients are now more likely to consider a specialty referral option, so I do a lot more referrals than I did when I first arrived here and a lot more than I would otherwise want to do. Several of our physicians have become employees of a huge physician organization whose brochure states, in essence, that “Primary care is the doctor you go to, to help you figure out which specialist to see.”
Fifty percent of my patients are on Medicare. Of the other 50 percent, everybody has managed care of some type. The only difference it makes to me is that I have to fill out more forms. Part of the reason it's not a problem is that there is no competition here in primary care. The patients who live in this town are going to have to come to see someone in this group, by and large, unless they hate us all, in which case, they could travel some distance. Managed care will never have the same impact here as it does in a place like California, where you have plans competing with each other, and there are real issues about patient jumping. I have patients who have gone through three plans in the last five years. I'm always the doctor. If they're in California, they would be changing doctors. But here there's nobody else for them to see.
What has changed is that if somebody came in with a headache nineteen years ago, I would have talked to them and, unless I had been really worried, I would not have ordered any more tests. Now, the chances are better than fifty-fifty that the same patient with a headache knows about CAT scans and expects one—regardless of the fact that I don't think one is indicated in the vast majority of cases. When I first came here, patients were not as educated about health issues as they are today. “What are you here for?” I'd ask them. “That's what I came to find out,” they'd respond. “You're the doctor, you figure it out.” This sort of attitude gave me latitude in where to go with things, but also showed that the patient remained marginally involved in what was going on.
Poverty in this area is not concentrated, the way it is in what's called Vermont's northeast kingdom in the northern part of the state, where people have no money and live in shacks with no electricity. Isolated poverty is quite common here, but most of my patients get by okay. Windsor is distinctive in that we had a maximum-security prison and several factories. Once the factories left town, a large apartment complex, initially designed for factory workers, became home for the wives and children of the prisoners, and that brought in an underclass. The apartment complex looks like something that was airlifted out of the Bronx. It's a huge brick structure. There's nothing anywhere like it in Vermont. So we have this small underclass population. I handled a case of lead poisoning when I first got here, a kid who lived on a back porch and ate lead, just like in an urban setting. Outside of the prison-related population, some immigrant Vietnamese, and a few adopted black children, it's still a white culture.
I have more access to specialists than I would like to have. It's kind of like having too many restaurants to choose from. You're also more likely to eat out when you have a lot of restaurants, and I'd really rather eat at home. For every disease there's someone who is smarter than I am. I could send every patient to somebody else for every complaint, but that's not what I choose to do. My practice is made up of patients I've known for a long time, and they tend to look primarily to me for guidance. An irritated cardiac surgeon to whom I had sent one of my patients called me once, saying, “We think your patient needs to have his mediastinum opened up because he's gotten a postoperative infection, and he wants me to check with you.” That's patient loyalty.
There's a group practice of younger physicians in a nearby town who don't even come into the hospital when they're on call. When somebody gets sick they send him to Hanover to the medical center. If somebody
When I was in medical school, cholesterol wasn't much of an issue. If you identified a patient with high cholesterol, it was really high—like 500 and they'd have huge globs of fat hanging from their eyeballs. You'd call people. Big hoopty-do. Now, everybody is potentially a patient because we've lowered the cholesterol standard so that nobody will pass. This means that there are people trooping in and out of the office all the time who aren't sick. People have gotten used to going to the doctor on the premise of not being sick—which is okay. But when they get sick, they think, “I've got to see a different doctor. This is not my doctor for sick. This is my doctor for cholesterol, and blood pressure, and maybe Pap smears. Now that I'm actually sick, I need a specialist.” Many younger internists and family practitioners collaborate in this by focusing on health maintenance and avoiding more intensive forms of patient care. And since everybody does get sick sooner or later, this kind of thinking has led to a doubling in the number of specialists in the country. A cynic might say that we were training too many doctors in this country and we didn't have enough sick people to go around. Since lots of the new doctors were becoming specialists, we had to find something more for them to do, so we invented diseases in well people.
One way to stem the tide of expense and futility in medicine would be to admit students into medical school who aren't quite so smart. Why don't we just conclude that we have enough medicine right now? We won't make any more improvements, and we'll live with what we've got for a while. Maybe thirty years from now we'll start working on it again. If our doctors were not particularly smart, sort of nineteenth-century doctors, we wouldn't invent new procedures. We'd just muddle along, and things would stabilize. The rest of the economy would grow for a while, and we'd stop spending larger and larger chunks of it on medical care.
When a patient arrives in my office I put this cuff around his arm and pump it up. “You've got hypertension,” I say. The patient says, “That's the silent killer,” and we start down the long, long road of antihypertensive treatment. Now the fact that everybody's going to die, and that
I think that the evolution now is toward primary care as very distinct from secondary care. Primary care, as I see it, is really wellness care, secondary care is general sickness care, and then tertiary care is caring for people with special sicknesses. Wellness care means dealing with the “presick” who have yet-to-be-determined diseases. I see my general internist role as doing secondary care as well as my own brand of primary care. That's what I was trained to do. What I like best about my practice is the interaction with people but, I have to admit, there still is a part of me that likes disease. I get energized when somebody comes in with an abnormality. But I've known most of these people for a long time, and it's always upsetting when I pass along a bad diagnosis. I had a medical student with me one day when a patient's CAT scan came back with an ominous spot in the right lung. The student was excited. “This person's going to have lung cancer.” I responded, “If your sister had this CAT scan you would not be very excited.”
I've lived in the community and know everybody here. A woman on chemotherapy just came in with a sore ear, terrified. I looked in her ear and it was okay; she felt great and so did I. I like that. I have to have a certain number of sick people to fuss with or I feel that I'm betraying my training. But I don't need a lot of it; I don't even need it every day. People in Windsor give doctors so much benefit of the doubt—more so than anyone else including the local clergymen. I can make a fool of myself, and people don't mind; I march in parades wearing wild outfits, I write crazy stories in the newspaper and, because I'm a doctor, people like me.
I'm an ex–Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, and I keep up with infectious diseases. In 1983 I made the diagnosis of Legionnaire's disease in a hospital patient. After another case was diagnosed and we found the source in the hospital's water heater, we were credited with what has
At the press conference I joked, “This is nature's revenge. You put people in buildings and nature says, ‘This is not what you're supposed to be doing,’ so it's got germs to try and combat you with this.” A guy there from the local newspaper said, “You've got a strange way of looking at things. Will you write an article about this?” So I did. They then asked if I'd write some more, and I did. The paper is called the Valley News and has a circulation of around forty or fifty thousand. I wrote a piece on herpes, and something on why doctors lie. A couple were sort of whimsical. Eventually, I wrote a column every other week under the heading “The Second Opinion.” It was never serious, though I always told the truth. I enjoyed the writing, and after three or four years my editor suggested I collect the pieces into a book. I sent them to a publisher, who responded, “I don't know how we're going to use this. There's no market for it. But maybe you want to write it into something that fits together.” I turned the articles into a sort of diary that, in 1988, came out as my first book, Bag Balm and Duct Tape. After that, I was off and running. My second book, It's Not My Fault, was published in 1995.
I really enjoy writing. It imposes a kind of discipline on me that medicine doesn't. My first and second drafts are usually gibberish. I have to rewrite probably six or seven times to get what I want. In medicine you don't usually have that chance. I'm working on a book that is much more difficult than my other two, which were just stories I wrote from my everyday experience. This one is about a doctor who practiced in my town one hundred and seventy years ago. She was a woman, but because women weren't allowed in medicine she had to practice as a man. It has been a real challenge to set myself in a time where doctors knew almost nothing and the only two medicines of any definite benefit were morphine and quinine. I'm not sure I am good enough to write it, but I'm working at it.
Trine and I have three children. Our youngest, Nadya, teaches Spanish in the Boston area and the oldest, Matt, teaches science in Woodstock, Vermont. He lives about one mile from us. Our middle daughter, Dylan, lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband. She is a research analyst for the Vera Institute, which does analytic work on social service programs. None of my children ever showed the slightest interest in medicine, which is okay.
Trine is a recovering attorney. After she got her degree here she went into private practice, which is not what she really wanted to do. One of the problems in the country is that you feel left out of the real problems of the world. She went into family law and had an extremely busy and successful practice for twelve years. In 1990, she became a family court magistrate. Then she quit it all in 1994 and went to Baltimore as an Annie E. Casey Foundation Fellow. She worked as a consultant for the Rhode Island Department of Children's Services and now for the state of Vermont trying to bring some sense into the way the courts and the social services deal with abused and neglected children. Unless Trine takes a job elsewhere (which is a possibility), I plan to practice here until I retire, because at this point there's nothing else I can do. I have an excellent practice, and I'm the senior physician in town. Everybody looks up to me, except the people who can't stand me. It's a very small pond, but I'm the biggest frog in it. In ten years, if I'm still in good health, I'll cut back my practice and start writing more.
I'm fond of telling patients something that is very clear to me. “You know, if I treat you long enough only two things can happen. Either you die or I die.” So I keep treating sick people, and I recognize the futility of it because they're going to die. But I keep at it because it's what I do.
Linda Headrick with her colleagues in quality improvement, medical student Kenan Sauder and faculty member Jack Medalie, M.D.
LINDA HEADRICK, M.D.
SEEKING A COMMON LANGUAGE IN PRIMARY CARE
Cleveland, Ohio
Linda Headrick is an academician—a teacher, a clinician, and a trafficker in new ideas. She is a member of the “academy” by dint of being on the faculty of Case Western Reserve University Medical School in Cleveland, Ohio. But she is not a classical academician by traditional standards. Her patients tend to be those with common problems rather than those with esoteric ones. Her teaching addresses the problems of the system and the population in addition to the biological problems of the individual. Her research subjects are neither patients nor laboratory animals but rather the system that makes the medical center and health care delivery function—or malfunction.
She is a quiet but constant warrior against complacency in medicine. Her passion is “quality” or “quality improvement,” but these well-worn terms do not do justice to her mission. “What is the aim of our work?” she asks. “How do we know when it works and how well it works?” Satisfying the doctor or the institution or meeting some long-outdated goal does not mean that “our work” is “working.” Her research and her
Dr. Headrick's base of operation is one of the nation's most prestigious medical schools—one that is increasingly open to her mission but still uncertain what to make of it. There is growing respect for her ability to interpret the powerful industrial forces that are buffeting academic health centers across the country, but for many the enthusiasm for applying this wisdom at home is tempered by a reluctance to abandon age-old institutional behaviors.
The daughter of a career agricultural extension agent, articulate and enthusiastic, Dr. Headrick speaks with gusto about her work. She is applied and practical in her vision, and she has a growing cadre of allies around the country in education, practice, and business. She believes that the generalist physician and nurse are well positioned to lead a quiet revolution in how we do our medical business in this country, how we improve it, and how we keep on improving it over time.
RIGHT FROM THE START I wanted to be a primary care doctor. I was going to take care of folks over time. I was going to be there for them, the first contact person, whatever they needed. I liked the science, but it was the relationship part of medicine that I found most appealing and where I thought I had the greatest skill.
I think my dad's work influenced me, although I didn't realize it until I was talking with a medical student a couple of years ago. He asked me about what my folks did. I told him about my dad. My father worked for the University of Missouri Extension Service, helping community businesses and community development in general. He started as a county agent after World War II and spent his career in the extension service. I tried to explain to the student what that was. “Well, basically he was part of the community and used the resources of the university to try to make things better.” The student responded, “Oh, that's interesting. That's sort of like what you try to do.” This huge light bulb went on, and I realized that the extension ethic was a big influence on me.
The Protestant ethic—literally, the Protestant ethic—was a factor for me too. My mother's influence was very important there. Her father was a Baptist minister, although our own family was Methodist. Responsibility
I'm from Missouri. I grew up in Chillicothe, a little town of about ten thousand people, a hundred miles northeast of Kansas City. When we moved to Chillicothe, my dad was promoted to director of a nine-county area for the Agricultural Extension Service. It was in seventh grade I decided I wanted to be a physician. There were no doctors in my family, but I came from a family where it was, “Sure, whatever you want to do. Education is important, and if you want to go for that, that sounds good.” Except my grandmother, interestingly enough, who got this downcast look on her face and said, “Linda, I always thought you'd be such a wonderful nurse.”
I went to the University of Missouri–Columbia and majored in chemistry for, what I'm embarrassed to say now, were pretty typical premed reasons. This was 1973, and at that time the competition for medical school was tough. I went to a meeting—one meeting, that's all I could tolerate—of the Pre-Med Society and they had us, all the freshmen, stand up and look at the people on either side, and they said, “Only one of the three of you will actually get into medical school.” That was the competitive atmosphere.
Everything wasn't premed at the university. I met my husband there. He was a year ahead of me, a molecular biologist. When I started looking for medical schools, I was trying to follow where he'd gone to graduate school, which was Stanford. I started there in the fall of 1977. But Stanford was different, filled with people with very different backgrounds from mine—prep schools, Ivy League, and cultural experiences I hadn't had. I found the first two years difficult, but I felt that I blossomed in the clinical years because I could draw upon all of my skills, not just my ability to read a book and memorize what was there. Stanford has a reputation of not being supportive of primary care. I didn't feel that so much because it was not difficult to find people who shared my interests. There was a growing group of general internal medicine people, and they had a small but valiant group of family medicine physicians. I didn't feel particularly discouraged in my interest in primary care, except that I clearly didn't match the specialty and research focus of many of the faculty.
My husband got his degree in molecular biology and accepted a postdoctoral position at the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore. That meant I needed to find a residency in the Baltimore-Washington area. I had to decide between family medicine and general internal medicine. The fact
My husband was also looking for faculty jobs at that time. He was offered a position in Cleveland. On his second visit, he was invited to bring “the wife” along, and they tried to find “the wife” a job. Interesting position to be in. It worked out quite well, in fact. I wound up joining the Division of General Internal Medicine at Metro [Metro Health Medical Center, formerly Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital]. All of the physicians there were fulltime faculty of Case Western Reserve University [CWRU]. My job was as a halftime practitioner and a halftime educator, helping to run the residency program and a fourth-year primary care medical student clerkship. This was 1985.
I started out in practice, loved it, and got so busy that, after about two years, I couldn't take any more new patients. Everybody wanted us—the general internists—for everything. The specialists wanted to refer their patients to us because once they controlled a specific problem, they recognized that the patient needed longterm primary care. They were delighted to send patients to us. The surgeons grew to value our contributions in doing perioperative consultation. The house staff said they thought that the generalists were the best teachers in the wards.
When I became involved in the larger educational programs, though, I began to encounter some of the more negative attitudes about primary care, particularly from people in other fields. I'm afraid I was surprised that other faculty didn't care about the same things I did. Why isn't it a good idea to teach physical diagnosis in the first year so people can be learning with patients at the same time they're learning in the classroom? That's not a primary care–oriented issue on the surface, but it has a very primary care–oriented flavor to it. Why shouldn't we have students learn from generalists as well as specialists? Don't we learn scientifically even if we can't isolate one variable and have sixteen controls? What I'm interested in is harder to control, harder to experiment with, but so important, so critical to the problems before us.
I also continued my role as an innovator, in that I couldn't leave things alone. There were lots of opportunities to do things differently, and I was
I decided to evaluate and write about some specific education projects that we had done that others seemed to think were interesting and unique. I was frustrated by my inability to do that very well, and particularly by my lack of preparation with respect to quantitative and research methods. Early on, I started going to national meetings. In particular, the Society for General Internal Medicine helped me see that people were defining careers for themselves in academic general internal medicine that were education-focused. With those role models, I began to think of myself as an educator, a primary care physician and an educator. Eventually, I also arranged to work part time to get a master's degree in health services research.
It was great luck that Duncan Neuhauser was here at CWRU in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. He has a Ph.D. in business administration and was interested in teaching students about the costs of medical care in the context of primary care. We designed a project in which students wrote case studies of patients with asthma and shared what they learned about how to think about measuring quality and cost of care in asthma. Initially, we focused on cost. We asked the students to simply go out and find out how much it cost for what they prescribed for a particular patient with asthma. That was astonishing. Students had no idea it cost $40 for a steroid inhaler, for instance. Duncan kept saying, “You know, Linda, it's a very interesting thing about cost. We can't think about it alone. We can't talk to our class about cost without teaching
With tremendous help from the chief of general internal medicine, Randall Cebul, I did a randomized controlled clinical trial, an education trial about cholesterol screening and management with the residents at Metro. None of it worked. Resident behavior didn't change. I thought, I wonder what happened? The residents picked up a chart, and there would be a bright yellow piece of paper on the front that stated, “Patient's last cholesterol was 270. According to the guidelines, the next thing to do is … “and all they had to do was fill out a form to do it. So I surveyed the house staff. I said, “Was the yellow form there?” “Yes.” “Do you agree that this is an appropriate thing to do with your patients?” “Yes.” “Do you agree with the recommendations?” “Yes.” “How often do you do it?” They thought 75 percent of the time. The real answer was only half the time, which was no different from the residents who received no coaching and prompting. “Why didn't you do it?” It was all systems issues. “There wasn't enough time.” “I didn't have enough help.” “I couldn't find the form.” There also was no difference in performance of residents who scored well on the test of cholesterol management knowledge and those who did poorly.
I was stuck. Until I learned about quality improvement, I had no way of getting at the systems problems that kept us from being able to do what we knew how to do, and we'd like to do, but just couldn't do consistently, patient to patient. Then I met Edward McEachern, who had been a medical student at CWRU, and was working as a consultant for hospitals that were trying to improve quality. He taught me a lot and helped me identify what to read. Duncan helped me connect with Donald Berwick and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement [IHI], which has sponsored our work using and teaching quality improvement in medical education. I've been learning like crazy ever since. Paul Batalden, who leads IHI's work in health professions education, has become my most important mentor in this area. Now working out of Dartmouth, he is one of the country's best thinkers about the improvement of health care. I'm constantly finding other people who have also been influenced by his work.
What I want is to have medical students finish medical school, or residents finish residency, ready to actively improve the care that they're
Physicians now seem to be fairly accepting of the fact that cost is something they're going to have to deal with. Improvement methods allow them to deal with the cost issue by focusing on quality, and that is very attractive. But many physicians, and particularly academic physicians, are still negative about thinking of the people we serve as customers. They don't like the idea of transporting business ideas into medicine, they don't think they belong. Generally, though, I'm finding now that a lot of academic leaders are asking me about quality improvement. People seem more friendly to the idea of thinking in systems—including managed care systems. I've been asked to travel all over the country to consult for medical schools and hospitals on teaching quality principles in medicine. Many physicians recognize in their everyday lives now that they have to work as part of systems. Otherwise the system will roll right over them.
I think that the natural leaders of systems in health care are general-ists, because they have the broad perspective needed to have a systems view. The same personality types and the same sort of worldview fit both places. But even if you're not a leader, if you're a practitioner working with your office nurse, your receptionist, and the pharmacy, you're going to be better off if you can be thinking about that as a system and figuring how to deliver better care in that system. And you have to, because people are going to be asking you what your outcomes are.
One of the critical tensions that is going to be important in my lifetime as a health care professional is the tension between reductionist thinking that breaks things into small parts and broad systems thinking
For a while I was trying to learn how to play the banjo. I was very serious about it. My teacher was trying to get me to learn how to play by ear, but I had picked out a couple of songs on a record that I liked a lot. In my typical reductionist way, I tried to listen very carefully to write the song down so I could understand the chord structure, exactly what the notes were. I was going to try to tape it, and write it down, and break it down into pieces, learn the pieces, and put them back together again. I completely blew my teacher away. He thought that was the dumbest approach to learning how to play a piece of music he ever heard in his life. He was trying to get me to try to think of the music as a system, to really hear the music and have it come out in my fingers. And he had no better way of describing it to me, and I had no idea how to do it.
I would argue now that a good generalist needs to be able to do both—reductionist thinking and systems thinking. In fact, I think that from the perspective of a system of care, one has to ask, why are internal medicine and family medicine separate? What are the roles here? The goal is to deliver the best primary care. It doesn't make sense to divide it up between medicine, family medicine, and pediatrics. We have to sort of scramble, depending on the environment we're in, to define how we're different from one another. I also think that it's nonsensical and, frankly, foolish not to take advantage of what our colleagues in nursing and other disciplines know about doing primary care. I'm a general internist. There are things that family practitioners know, that physician assistants know, that I'd be a much better primary care physician if I knew. There are things that nurses do that the ideal primary care physician of the future would be better off knowing how to do—such as listening, counseling, thinking about families, and thinking about the caring part of care. So why are we not teaching them together, and why are we not combining our strengths rather than splitting them up? What I would like to see in the future is a new kind of primary care provider who is the product of the best in all those fields.
As I look to the future, I know I want to be in a place where I continue to have the freedom to explore and learn, and have a laboratory in which to do that. I think that I'll stay in academic medicine because of my devotion to education. Some days I think I'm better off staying
At home I'm still married to the same biologist who enticed me west to Stanford years ago. My work is way out there at a systems level. He spends his days on a molecular level, working on the precise factors that control RNA transcription. He's a good bellwether for me because he is a very thoughtful guy who cares about the world and shares my values of what would be good for the community and the country. The kind of thinking I do is so different from what he does. He respects me and my work and is willing to explore my professional interests—ideas that otherwise might make him very suspicious. He's a key reminder to me about important parts of my audience in the academic medical community.
Recently I heard a senior physician, a family physician, describe his career to a group of medical students. He talked about all the different paths he has taken, and he did so with considerable excitement about every step of the way. I was listening to him and thinking, you know, I can do that. I think when I'm seventy, I will still get excited about these things, because so far I've been challenged and excited by new questions and new solutions that I think are important—and will remain important. That's the one thing that I absolutely can be sure about, that I'm going to be an avid learner, and have fun doing it. I will continue to work hard to move us closer to a world in which all physicians finish their educations ready to assess and improve the work they do every day, with a clear focus on the individuals, families, and communities they serve.
Selma Deitch brings pediatrics to the classroom.
SELMA DEITCH, M.D., M.P.H.
CHILDREN FIRST
Manchester, New Hampshire
One hundred fifty years ago, when the first American children's doctors began calling themselves pediatricians, some 200 of every 1,000 infants born died before the age of twelve months. Today that rate is 7 in 1,000, a monumental accomplishment of pediatrics and of public health and a marker of dramatically improved child health in the United States.
Selma Deitch is a practitioner of both of these disciplines, and for much of the latter half of this century she has devoted her training, her energies, and her personality to the cause of improving the health of children. At seventy-three, she remains in full stride as the founder, executive director, and chief booster of Child Health Services, a nineteen-year-old, innovative pediatric clinic for lowincome families in downtown Manchester, New Hampshire. Part clinician and part public health zealot, she sees patients, raises precious support funds, and consults nationally on maternal and child health issues. “I work two weeks a week,” she states simply.
Born in Manchester to immigrant parents, she grew up wanting to be a veterinarian but gravitated toward medicine under the influence of her
Child Health Services occupies a large storefront on Manchester's Elm Street in the city's old business district, which surely has seen no elm trees in many decades. The offices are newly refurbished thanks to a $1 million community fundraising campaign. Energetic and grandmotherly, carrying a stethoscope and a notepad, Deitch points with pride to the mini–jungle gym in the waiting room, the engaging animal prints on the walls, and the new, multipurpose teen room. Her enthusiasm for her creation is palpable.
Deitch is not without her adversaries—individuals or institutions whom she considers rigid or not clear about the needs of children. “Child Health Services,” she observes, “has given me the privilege of being a bit of a free thinker, of having the luxury of being my own person and being able to push the system. That really is a privilege.”
I HAVE SEEN A LOT of children over the years, including many sick ones. Some of the things that make me happiest about my work, though, don't have to do with medicine in the traditional sense. Recently I was able to arrange for a photography shop to donate a camera to a thirteen-year-old patient and to get him enrolled in a photography camp. He's having a wonderful summer. But I know that he was born to a thirteen-year-old girl and that he bounced from day care center to day care center while his mother tried to stay in school. His mother finally quit school because she just couldn't get coverage for her baby. At age five he was molested by a boyfriend of his mother. Now his mother has settled down, is married to a stable man, and is working fulltime. But along the way, terrible things happened to the little boy.
With a little help now from the staff of Child Health Services, he was enrolled in a summer program for gifted students for the previous two years and is showing real promise as a photographer. He brought me his
This is a critical part of pediatric care in the 1990s in Manchester, the city where I was born, the adopted city of my parents. My father came from the Ukraine near Kiev, and my mother was from Lithuania. She was eight years old when she arrived with an older sister to stay with relatives in the Boston area. My father came to Boston when he was eighteen or nineteen. He had been a premedical student in Odessa, Ukraine. When he arrived, he enrolled in high school and then went on to medical school at Tufts, graduating in 1918. My mother became a nurse. In those days that was a pretty special thing for an immigrant woman. Her relatives expected that as soon as she could speak English, she would work in a button factory. She was head of an operating room where my father was the intern during the influenza epidemic of 1919. The day they married in 1919 was the end of her nursing career.
They moved to Manchester in 1921, where my father went into practice as a GP with a special interest in surgery. After that, my mother was responsible for answering the telephone when the office was closed. I used to imitate the way she answered. “Hello,” she used to say angrily. She was not really an angry person, but the role tied her down. I think that was characteristic of the time. Women were not getting out to do their own thing. When I was thinking about what I wanted to do with my life, she shook her hand at me and said, “Don't ever be a nurse.”
I was born in 1924, the second of three girls. I was going to be a veterinarian because I loved dogs. I think my father gave me subtle encouragement to pursue medicine, support that made it easier for me to keep going to school. I went to Jackson College, which was the women's part of Tufts, and took mostly premed requirements, all those courses that have labs. I was even advised to take scientific German. Scientific German! I snuck in a few liberal arts courses, but the rest was science. It was wartime, and we were encouraged to go to school summers and get through quickly. I was nineteen when I graduated in 1944 and too young, they told me, to go to medical school, so I was accepted for the following year. I moved into the Elizabeth Peabody House, a settlement house in Boston, where I taught neighborhood kids to build airplane models as my contribution as a tenant.
I started at Tufts Medical School in the fall of 1945. There weren't many women in our class but more than in earlier years. There was some sense that the war provided an extra opportunity for women, since it wasn't clear how many men would be available. Although I'm very
I wanted a rotating internship. I couldn't go to Boston City Hospital because they had no place for women to stay. Mount Auburn was the other hospital that I wanted to go to, but they wouldn't take women in rotating internships. I finally accepted a position at Springfield Hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts, mostly because the man I was going to marry was taking a surgical residency in Boston, and Springfield was the closest rotating internship I could get.
One of my first rotations was in ENT; I had to give anesthesia for tonsillectomies. Kids. I felt sorry for them. I remember dropping ether on the gauze over their noses while they were lying on stretchers and rolling them into the OR. In Springfield I was inspired by a very bright pediatrician, Hy Schumann. He taught me an awful lot about hospital pediatrics, and I enjoyed the way he practiced. This exposure got me thinking about pediatrics.
I came back to Boston after the year of internship and did what was called a fellowship at the Boston Dispensary—the outpatient department for Tufts teaching hospitals. I worked as a preceptor for the same home medicine program that I had taken as a student, this time in the Irish neighborhoods of South Boston. I still loved the work. I began to see pediatric patients on my own under the supervision of the pediatric staff from the Boston Floating Hospital. I had decided that pediatrics was what I wanted to do with my life and, in the summer of 1951, I began two years of pediatrics residency followed by a year as chief resident at the Boston Floating Hospital. It was an intensive exposure to the hospital treatment of sick children. Penicillin was a new and exciting drug then, and we had chloramphenicol with its benefits and complications. We saw a lot of things that you don't see often today; replacement transfusions were common for Rh incompatibility, acute epiglottitis, meningitis,
I saw my first and most tragic case of lead poisoning in my first week as a resident. The child came in with acute encephalopathy, the only child of older parents. The anesthetist put four burr holes in his head to relieve the pressure, but the boy died. He'd been eating his crib paint, and his parents kept repainting it. We knew about pica, but people didn't know that most paint contained lead at that time.
I was amused to read recently about a professional athlete who had raised money to make a floor at the New England Medical Center into a residential facility for families of patients with cancer. The article said something like, “Farnsworth Five, a dilapidated part of New England Medical Center that has tile falling down, and floors that need repairing, and rugs that are torn.” When I was there, female residents didn't have a place to stay the nights we were on call, so we all shared one room on Farnsworth Five. Sometimes there were more of us than there were beds. It could be crowded, but we thought Farnsworth Five was a pretty spiffy place in those days.
When I finished my residency, I moved to Needham and went to work covering the practice of a pediatrician who was called up during the Korean War. I continued doing this kind of parttime coverage until he returned, but I kept up my affiliation with the dispensary. In 1958, I became the director of the pediatric outpatient department of the Boston Dispensary, which was the Boston Floating Hospital outpatient department. It was a general pediatric outpatient department for lowincome patients from South End, South Boston, East Boston, and Charlestown. The pediatric residents rotated through. The attendings were physicians who had privileges at the Floating, who gave their time for a month or two a year to precept the residents and the medical students.
I did a lot of teaching, and I learned a lot. One thing I never forgot is not to assume that a person who's in training knows how, for instance, to look at an ear. I always had to look for myself. I also learned about the role of social work from a woman named Liz Wheeler. She taught me a great deal about families and how they function. We also had the benefit of a nutrition service in the outpatient department. Right there in our outpatient department was an ongoing nutrition program where they served food to the kids and taught people how to budget and purchase, to do all those basic but important things.
The chairman of pediatrics at Tufts at that time was a wonderful generalist named James Marvin Baty. Those of us who worked with him
These experiences had a lot to do with shaping me as a pediatrician and determining what I would do in the future. But a lot also went on in my own family life during these years. I married my classmate in 1950 and had my first child when I was finishing my residency in 1953. We were divorced in 1957. Through my extended family, I met a wonderful man, a chemical engineer back in Manchester, and we were married in 1960. He had three children, and we had one more together. I actually commuted to Boston until 1965, when I finally settled down in my old hometown after being away for nineteen years.
During this whole period, I believe I was beginning to use a different language about health care. From what I had learned in the outpatient department, I was much more aware of things that had to be brought together based on the role of communities in health care. I became more of an advocate for kids in school and families who didn't get care at all. I didn't know what public health was then, but in retrospect I had become a public health–oriented pediatrician. When I left my work in Boston, I enrolled at the Harvard School of Public Health, commuting daily for a full year and graduating in 1966. It was a wonderful time at the school with fabulous faculty and students from all over the world. I wrote my master's thesis on day care in Manchester, a system previously unknown to me, resulting in my growing interest in child care policy.
My first real job in public health was as a parttime, volunteer medical director of the Head Start program in Manchester. We had Head Start only in the summertime then, and it gave me the chance to get to know people in Manchester whom I hadn't really known before, an entirely white, poor population who were largely French Canadian. We started programs in three different public schools. I got to know school principals in a nice way that held me in good stead as life went on. In 1966, the director of the New Hampshire Department of Health hired
It had always been difficult to use federal funding to build programs in New Hampshire. The basic philosophy was against accepting any federal money because the federal money would eventually “go away” and the state would be stuck with the program, so the attitude was “Let's not do anything the government pays for.” Nonetheless, we did get some new MCH money and were able to start many programs, including well-child clinics, all over the state and the real jewels, four comprehensive Children and Youth [C and Y] clinics in North Conway, Exeter, Charlestown, and Suncook. We established family planning sites in many places and, despite much opposition, they survived. People associated birth control with abortion, and still do. If you don't talk about one, you don't talk about the other. Many decision makers were against family planning—period. My strategy always was to start programs first by going to where people were receptive. There was need, goodness knows, everywhere. In the Dover and Rochester areas, we started prenatal and family-planning programs together because there was good community support and good local leadership. The federal Community Action Program came in at that time and collaborated well with us.
While I was MCH director, I worked as a pediatrician in one of our clinics at Suncook. I also saw patients in the Crippled Children's Clinic, a multispecialty service for children with problems like cleft palate, seizure disorders, and cystic fibrosis. It kept my clinical hand in, and I got to know physicians and public health nurses around the state. I learned a lot from those public health nurses.
I left state government in 1974 because I wanted to spend more time laying on hands. I'd become much more aware of underserved populations
The Institute did well enough for three or four years, but I really wanted to be able to provide primary health care services to lowincome families with children in need here in Manchester. Mrs. Gruber pushed me to look for more backers because she was restless about being our only resource. A number of foundations had turned me down, but suddenly two grants came through simultaneously—the federal Bureau of Maternal and Child Health and the local United Way. At about the same time I called the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, D.C., and they were able to provide me with articles that showed that comprehensive programs (like Head Start) were far more effective in the long term than piecemeal programs. The Manchester superintendent of schools at the time was my classmate from high school. I asked him to go up before the mayor and board of aldermen with me, using the data I had collected, to argue that even if 10 percent of the children we saw in our clinic were more healthy and ready for school, we could reduce the cost of education because they were not going to need special help later on. It would save the city money. Amazingly they voted to fund us and have continued to supply about 8 percent of our budget ever since.
In November of 1979 we opened Child Health Services on Elm Street in Manchester as a nonprofit agency with one pediatrician—me. We also had a program administrator/community organizer, a social worker, a family-support worker, a parttime nutritionist, a secretary, and a board of community doers. Our aim was to provide fullservice health care to children from lowincome families. From the very beginning we limited our enrollment to families that had at least one child younger than two or a child younger than seven with a special medical need. We did this because we planned to promote parenting functions, to support family strengths, and to be in a position to intervene when necessary.
Almost twenty years later, we are following the same model, more or
We get a high percentage of referrals from other agencies, hospital emergency departments, intensive care units, and nurseries, plus private doctors, neighbors, and relatives of current clients. We have a waiting list, but if we get a call saying, “This mother's going to be discharged, and we doubt the family's ability to provide consistent parenting,” we arrange to take that family right away. We have one social worker who meets the family at the hospital. Her job is to project to what extent that family will need our involvement as an agency. Meanwhile, we collect all of the medical information so that we can go over it prior to the first visit. We do the same with a child born with spina bifida, for example, or an infant with an enlarged liver. We try to make all the needed connections: education, transportation, and treatment. Local pediatricians provide our hospital backup.
Over a third of our clients are now teenagers, just by virtue of the fact that they've stayed with us since infancy. So we do a lot of adolescent health, both through a Planned Parenthood/Teen Options program that meets in our office space in the late afternoon or evening and through our regular clinic program. But our adolescent strategy isn't working well. Our way is still too traditional for adolescents. We knew we needed more staff to be able to have dropin discussion groups, “hang-around” sessions for teens, peer counseling–type activities. We needed to shake up our system for teens and, for that matter, for their parents. We needed a much more casual, flexible approach with much peer influence. Our space became too small for the “hangaround” approach. A grant from the American Academy of Pediatrics got us started on a new teen program,
I think Dr. Robert Haggerty had it right a few years back when he began talking about the “new morbidities”—what we now call psychosocial health care. I mean young people using drugs and alcohol, and risky sexual behavior resulting in part from more and more dysfunctional families. Young people not finishing school, not being able to provide for themselves, and not being able to take care of their own families. These are the problems that are tearing our families and communities apart. These “morbidities” result in dysfunctional human beings in far greater numbers than the children who have physically disabling conditions—especially among the poor.
This is the part of pediatrics that I see as the major forte of the generalist pediatrician. It takes the skilled generalist together with support staff and a caring community to deal with these problems. I want every general pediatrician to be a good diagnostician and well trained so as to be able to treat illnesses properly. But the generalist also needs to be able to recognize simultaneously other aspects of that child's environment and development that are key to that child's health. How old are the parents, are they well, do they know how to use resources, what is their level of education, what are the community resources, and how does one access them? From the beginning, it has been the intent of our staff and board to promote this model of practice—the Child Health Services model—so it could be adapted in more traditional settings.
I think that over the past twenty years I've learned that I knew less about the health of people who were poor than I thought I did. I used to say that no child in New Hampshire was sexually abused except “up north in the wintertime.” That was naive and wrong. We have held parenting classes for young mothers who came to talk about how to raise children. By the second or third session these young parents want to talk about themselves, and often they begin to talk about how they were abused in their own lives: “This is what happened to me. I thought I had the big secret.” Spousal abuse is a big problem too. Just recently a teenaged mother with three small children—all my patients—was with her drunk husband and two or three of his friends. He picked a fight with his friends and then got out a knife to go after her because she was telling him to stop. So she called 911, and he went to jail. Two days later he got out again because he said he was sorry. And the children witnessed the whole thing.
There is an increase in family violence. It's not just that we've scratched the surface and found more. More is going on. People have more access to drugs and alcohol. Poverty is more prevalent, and with it comes more stress in the population we see. I have learned an enormous amount about how children are handled in families and how the community itself has not always responded to the needs of children. I simply didn't appreciate how rigid and provincial some people's attitudes can be in the face of the actual pathology that takes place. It's sort of like, “Oh, the plane crashed in Guatemala. Glad it wasn't here.” Many people aren't really accepting the fact that the kinds of things we're talking about are happening in our town, and they need fixing.
I have been blessed with a good and supportive blended family. My second marriage was a very good one with love, compatibility, and fun things, but my husband died in 1982. My youngest son is a lawyer here in New Hampshire and active in state government affairs. My older one is a lawyer in Boston. The youngest of my three stepchildren is a social worker in an HMO in Minnesota, the second teaches school in Barbados in the West Indies, and the third is a psychiatrist in Boston. All of their spouses and my grandchildren are a great pleasure to me.
Seeing Child Health Services grow and flourish has been a source of real satisfaction to me. I really try very hard to stick to what I feel is close to the truth, and to say what I feel has to be said. That's a privilege. I know there are some people along the way who think that I have been a troublemaker. Maybe I have been. I do know that for the sake of the program and the people supporting it, I try not to go out on a limb alone and risk the limb being chopped off.
But still, the system can be so rigid. I have a teenaged patient with tattoos who never did anything wrong to anybody. She got a little bit defiant regarding the dress code and piled up a bunch of administrative absences halfway through her junior year in high school and got expelled. She was born to a fifteen-year-old girl who works and who loves her daughter. We have provided her health care since infancy. She is a very bright girl and a talented musician, but she's determined to be herself. She loves hard rock, wants to play the piano professionally, but she needed to be in school badly. I called the principal, and I went down with her mother to see the superintendent but they said, “Look. She just doesn't fit the model.” So now she has her GED, works as a stock clerk, and plays the keyboard with a local band as we help her pursue other educational opportunities and keep healthy.
I went to my fifty-fifth high school reunion—the same high school—shortly after this girl's rejection. The high school principal was the featured speaker and was telling my classmates how wonderful the high school is now. They all were listening to him, pleased to hear what he had to say about “our” school. It really angered me because this was the same guy who wouldn't keep our patient in school. These graduates were told just what they wanted to hear, and then they went off to dance.
I think there's a lot of work still to be done.
4. The New Clinicians
Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants
Well past the middle of the twentieth century, every state had a medical practice act that granted qualified physicians a license to practice “medicine and surgery,” with little in the way of further requirements or definitions. At the same time that these acts ushered physicians onto the terrain of medical practice, they served to keep the rest of the world out. There was, in theory, a clear division between what doctors did and what, say, nurses did, though in practice there was always some amount of overlap, which tended to increase in areas with fewer doctors.
Two phenomena in the 1960s challenged the arbitrariness of the traditional “practice of medicine” statutes and concepts. The first was the development of a broad consensus that the United States was a doctor-poor country and needed to move rapidly to boost the capacity to deliver health services. This conclusion allowed physicians, nurses, educators, and legislators to think more creatively about who might provide medical services. The second development was the emergence of movements for the rights of individuals, particularly the women's rights movement. The intellectual and political environment was conducive to nontraditional thinking and to the birth of ideas and new professions such as the nurse practitioner and the physician assistant. Although these disciplines were technically and educationally new, both, in fact, built on the largely unacknowledged work in advanced care delivery that many nonphysicians had been performing for years.
The first nurse practitioner training program was started quietly in
Although some in nursing opposed the nurse practitioner idea as a capitulation to medicine and an abandonment of nursing, the concept caught on quickly, and new programs around the country began to provide training in adult care, family practice, and obgyn as well as pediatrics. Congress provided early support—which continues—for nurse practitioner educational programs, starting with the Nurse Training Act of 1971. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation also funded nurse practitioner training activities throughout the 1970s. In the early years many of the programs awarded certificates rather than formal degrees, but gradually the academic hierarchy of nursing adopted the nurse practitioner idea, and the programs today are almost exclusively at the master's degree level. Nursing programs award degrees to nurse practitioners by area of specialization, such as “F.N.P.” for family nurse practitioners. National certifying bodies offer exams to graduates which, when passed, attest to the abilities of the practitioners who may then use the designation “certified,” represented as “C” before “F.N.P.” Studies have shown repeatedly that nurse practitioners are well accepted by patients and get particularly good marks for communication skills and patient education.[2] The vast majority of the estimated 58,500 working nurse practitioners have remained in primary care.[3]
Nurse practitioners have always had to struggle for independence in their practice. State professional practice acts, with rules that determine the scope of practice and prescriptive authority for nurses, have been the principal battlegrounds for these issues, with nurses pushing for expansion of their authority and some physicians battling to hold the line. Liberalization has proceeded steadily, though irregularly, and some states allow nurse practitioners a greater scope of practice than others.[4] Nurse practitioners have also worked hard to secure direct compensation for
The physician assistant as a new profession emerged at almost the same time as the nurse practitioner. The first documented reference to the physician assistant concept appeared in a 1961 article in Journal of the American Medical Association by Charles Hudson, in which he called for “an advanced medical assistant with special training, intermediate between that of the technician and that of the doctor, who could not only handle many technical procedures, but could also take some degree of medical responsibility.”[5] In the mid-1960s, Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, was experiencing a severe shortage of both physicians and nurses. The chairman of the Department of Medicine, Dr. Eugene Stead, had tried to train and employ clinical nurses for advanced roles on specialty units, but the effort failed because of opposition from the National League for Nursing. In April 1965, Stead proposed a two-year program to train former military corpsmen as “physician's assistants.” That fall he enrolled four ex-Navy corpsmen and, with funds borrowed from an NIH grant, he inaugurated the nation's first physician assistant training program.[6]
The idea took root quickly. In September 1966, Look magazine ran a spread on the Duke students entitled “More Than a Nurse, Less Than a Doctor” touting the emerging physician assistants as representatives of “a new career that promises better care for the sick.” Multiple programs followed the Duke lead, including the Medical Extension (MEDEX) Program run by Dr. Richard Smith at the University of Washington that made heavy use of an apprenticeship model and began placing physician assistants throughout rural areas of the northwestern United States and, later, the Pacific basin. Funding for new physician assistant programs came from the Comprehensive Health Manpower Training Act of 1971 (initiating a stream of federal funding that continues today) as well as a number of private foundations. By the late 1970s, some fifty programs had opened; by the 1990s that number had more than doubled in response to rising demand. All programs are now academically affiliated, and most offer degrees at the bachelor's or master's level. To obtain state licensure, PAs must pass a national certifying exam after which they have the option of using the credential P.A.-C., reflecting their status as certified. Today there are estimated to be almost forty thousand physician assistants in practice.[7]
In name, history, and practice, physician assistants as a discipline are “derived” from physicians and medical practice. Over the years, the profession has been unambiguous in defining its relationship to physicians as dependent. To put it succinctly, physician assistants believe that dependence and performance autonomy are compatible. In this regard, the philosophy of physician assistants is quite different from that of nurse practitioners, for whom conceptual independence has great importance and for whom the notion of subservience to physician authority is objectionable. Nonetheless, the liberalization of the medical practice acts around the country has provided the physician assistant, like the nurse practitioner, with the potential for far more practice autonomy today than in the past. This phenomenon, coupled with their relatively easy working relationships with doctors, has contributed to a drift by physician assistants away from their conceptual roots in primary care. Today physician assistants are found throughout the health care system, with only about 50 percent engaged in primary care.
The future of the physician assistant and the nurse practitioner disciplines is not without uncertainty. Rapidly increasing numbers of schools and graduates over the last ten years have raised questions about practice opportunities in the future. Growing clinical autonomy, due to increased levels of training and reduced legal barriers, has raised the possibility of new categories of independent health care providers—a development welcomed by some and decried by others as further crowding and complicating the world of medical practice. For the past forty years, though, physician assistants and nurse practitioners together have provided enormous new capabilities and flexibility to health care in the United States. This contribution has been particularly important in primary care, where they have frequently been key clinicians in practices and systems. The stories in this chapter testify to that history.
Therese Hidalgo, C.F.N.P., trained and practiced as a nurse before ever hearing of the idea of the nurse practitioner. When she did, however, she caught hold and never looked back. She works in a practice in a large town in rural New Mexico as part of a primary care team. The route she has traveled is representative of many other nurse practitioners and has brought rich new capabilities to the practice of primary care. Carl Toney, P.A., followed a different, but likewise classical path to a similar point. As a veteran Vietnam medic, he returned to the United States to a civilian health care system illprepared to make use of his experience and skills. The physician assistant profession was created specifically to put his sort of capabilities to work in health care. Toney enrolled in an
Therese Hidalgo teaching the next generation.
THERESE HIDALGO, C.F.N.P.
PROUD TO BE A NURSE
Belen, New Mexico
Therese Hidalgo will tell you quickly and with pride that she is a New Mexican and a nurse practitioner. Twice a graduate of the University of New Mexico, trained at St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe, and now living in the railroad and farming community of Belen, she works at the town's ambulatory care center, which once was its hospital. Hidalgo has been a leader in the successful campaign to expand the scope of practice for nurse practitioners and an enthusiastic proponent of their role in delivering care in rural New Mexico.
Dressed in slacks and a vest, her desk stacked with patient charts, her office walls decorated with children's drawings, Hidalgo is at home in her clinic. When she began practice in Belen in 1991, she was the area's first nurse practitioner and, in her words, she had to “break some ground.” Doctors who had known her as a nurse had to adjust to her new role, and patients—many of whom had never heard of a nurse practitioner—had to try her out to form their own opinions. She does believe that doctors and nurses bring different perspectives to patient care, variability she salutes.
I'M A NURSE PRACTITIONER. I'VE had to break some ground, do some educating, and change some attitudes in both doctors and patients. I trained at New Mexico's premier educational institution—the University of New Mexico—but my practice is in a small town that never had seen a nurse practitioner before. Still and all, I see myself first and foremost as a nurse. I do some of the things that doctors do, but I am and always will be a nurse. I got a letter recently addressed to T. Hidalgo, M.D. The physician I work with saw the letter and said, “Look at that, Therese. Gosh, doesn't that make you feel good?” I said, “Absolutely not.” I want people to know that I don't feel I'm bringing something less than a doctor to my profession. I'm happy being a nurse who does some of what physicians do.
A person from Mars could probably tell by dropping in on our practice that doctors and nurses represent two different perspectives and ways to treat a patient. But it's subtle, and it also depends on the individual providing the care. I've seen some physicians who take almost a nursing-type approach to their patients. I remember telling one physician, “Gee, that was just so ‘nursey,’ the way you intervened with that patient. I'm really impressed.” I'd like to shed some of the old stereotypes and visions about our professions.
I began life as a New Mexican, but then detoured to Arizona for my early years before returning to New Mexico. I was born in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 1955, and grew up in Phoenix. I went to Catholic schools in Arizona through high school, and then moved back to New Mexico to go to college at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. I've been here in New Mexico ever since.
My mom worked as a nurse's aide in Phoenix and raised eight children on that income, which was difficult. She was a single parent; my father died when I was in third grade. Later my mother remarried, and we have three half-sisters, so there were eleven children in my family.
My high school in Arizona was mostly white and middle-class. There were very few Hispanics, and I definitely encountered barriers because of my ethnic origin. My original last name was Lopez. When my step-father adopted me I became Bloyed, but I was clearly Hispanic in appearance. In Arizona, the Hispanic population is treated differently than in New Mexico. I think there's more discrimination in Arizona—and prejudice. Most of the Hispanics had Spanish last names and accents that stereotyped them. I was a good student without an accent, and I didn't
My mom always wanted to be a nurse, so I thought that by becoming a nurse I could fulfill her dream and mine, too. At first, actually, I thought about going to medical school, but I remember deciding as a sophomore in high school that I wanted to have a family and that combining family and medical school wouldn't work. In those days, in my culture, family came first. So that helped me make the decision about nursing. I had my mom's and my family's support in that decision. I knew when I went to UNM that I wanted to go into nursing, and I graduated with my bachelor's degree in nursing in 1979.
Eventually my mom did start nursing school, but at about sixty-five years of age she switched out of nursing school and went back to college. In 1999 she finally got a bachelor's degree in bilingual education and counseling. There are several other nurses in our family. My brother became a licensed practical nurse and then went on to become a registered nurse. He and I used to have long discussions about L.P.N.s and R.N.s, and I kept urging him to go back for his R.N. When he did, I was very proud of him. I also have a sister who graduated from Arizona State University in nursing and is working on an Indian reservation in Tuba City, Arizona.
I started my nursing career on the floors at St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe. Obstetrics was my first love, and gradually I moved toward maternal-child areas, doing several years in labor and delivery followed by a year as the hospital staff educational coordinator. Altogether, I practiced in Santa Fe about seven years.
In 1977 while I was still at UNM, I married Miguel Hidalgo, a fourth-generation New Mexican from Belen. Miguel graduated from the University of New Mexico in architecture and has worked for both the state and in private practice over the years. Currently he is the director of capital projects for the state's Commission on Higher Education. We had the first of our three sons in 1980, while I was working in Santa Fe. Nursing has been very good to me in terms of raising a family because it allows a lot of leeway in choosing shifts. People think working the graveyard and evening shifts can be a real downer on family life but, actually,
When I was pregnant with my third son, my husband and I decided to make the move here to Belen, New Mexico, where my husband was born and raised. It's very different from Santa Fe, but it was good for our family goals, including raising the boys in the country. We have a ranch where we all help with breeding Santa Gertrudis cattle. We enter the cattle in state fairs, show them, and travel with them—it's a lot of fun.
In August of 1986, I began to work at the local hospital here in Belen. At first I was fearful about the new job, because I had become very specialized in maternal-child care early on in my career. I had no experience working in a small rural hospital, where an R.N. is responsible for an emergency room. I also had to handle geriatrics and take care of male patients again after primarily caring for women in recent years.
So the transition made me a little bit nervous—but it was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. I was challenged by the diversity of the job and became much broader. Even so, I was quickly driven toward labor and delivery again, and became head of the clinical department for maternal-child areas, including labor and delivery, postpartum, and pediatrics. I became a supervisor as well as a clinician.
Our hospital was one of several satellite rural hospitals owned and operated by Presbyterian Health Services, and it was closely affiliated with the main Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, thirty-five miles to the north. It was a thirty-four-bed hospital with full obstetrical services, including surgery and C-sections. We had a general surgeon here, an obgyn, two internists, a pediatrician, and some family practice doctors. We saw some acute care patients, but most emergencies were transported to Albuquerque.
Like many other rural hospitals around the country, however, it was in financial trouble. We served a large Medicaid population at the hospital, and there were reimbursement problems and ongoing financial losses. Finally, Presbyterian decided that, without support from the community, they would be forced to close the hospital. This was tough for the town and tough for me personally.
There was a lot of community discussion and some division, even
The year 1990 was also a year of change for me personally. Since the mid-1980s, as the obstetric nurse director in Belen, I had served on a lot of committees, both in the local hospital and in the larger organization in Albuquerque, which took a lot of time and commitment. By 1989, I wanted to do something for me, so I decided to go back to school for my master's degree in nursing. Even back in the 1970s, when I was getting my R.N. degree, I knew that I eventually wanted to be a nurse practitioner, but the UNM Medical School closed down its nurse practitioner program in 1980. So I had to tuck that dream away for a while, but I never let it die.
When I started looking around in 1989, I learned that the University of New Mexico was thinking of starting up a nurse practitioner program again. Even though they hadn't found grant funding yet, I started telling people I met that I was going to be part of UNM's new nurse practitioner program. I think the school felt sorry for me; in any case I was one of the first seven people chosen for the pilot program. I entered in fall 1989 and finished in 1991.
I had a lot of the same instructors in the UNM graduate program that I'd had as an undergraduate, but there was room for growth, and our group was able to make suggestions that were used to improve the program. There were still no role models in our preceptorships, though. I knew a nurse practitioner in Santa Fe, Barbara Salas Stehling, and asked her to come and talk at some of our educational programs, but I never worked directly with her. She was probably the only role model I had. The physicians I worked with in preceptorships didn't know much about nurse practitioners either, because they hadn't really worked with them.
Despite the lack of a role model or mentor, I did come away from the
The role of the nurse practitioner was more limited when I was in school. Prior to changes in the Nurse Practice Act in 1991, nurse practitioners worked only under the supervision of physicians and protocols. But some nurse practitioners were working in very rural areas, with only phone consultation, so physicians weren't really doing direct supervision. And while nurse practitioners have always been able to prescribe, their prescription authority did not include narcotics or scheduled drugs. Revisions to the Nurse Practice Act in 1991 tried to address all the different levels of independence: supervisory, interdependent, and independent. Nurse practitioners still had to maintain a connection with a physician, however, and various affidavits were signed to determine the level of the relationship.
In 1993, the act was amended again and cleaned up to get rid of all the language about differences between independent, interdependent, and doing supervised work. The new language says that we are “independent in primary care, chronic and acute, and will consult as needed.” At the same time, we gained the opportunity to apply for a Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA] number to write prescriptions for controlled substances. These changes in the Nurse Practice were supported unanimously by the state legislature in Santa Fe. I tell you, I think the nurses took the state medical society by surprise here in New Mexico. There was a lot of lobbying done on the part of our state Nurse Association. Not all the responses to the changes in the act have been positive, however. The osteopathic society, for example, has some objections on principle and has formally complained that the state legislature didn't give enough opportunity for rebuttal, so the changes slipped past them. I believe the state Medical Society also has made some comments. Pharmacists are also trying to become primary health care providers, and they have raised a lot of flags. The lack of role models is changing now. I have served on the Advanced Practice Committee for the Board of Nursing,
As the role of nurse practitioners has evolved, the program at UNM has also been growing. There were seven in our class, the next year about twenty, and this year almost forty. The goal of the program has been to promote rural health care, and much of the funding is linked to that goal. The program accepts people from out of state, and all graduates are encouraged to work in underserved areas. In my class, most of the graduates stayed in New Mexico, or on the border of Colorado and New Mexico, and about half ended up in rural areas such as where I work now in Belen.
After I finished the graduate program, I came back to work in Belen at the clinic in the former hospital, this time as a nurse practitioner. Many of the doctors and some of the nurses were left over from the hospital staff. It was comfortable to know the physicians already, but at the same time I felt a lot of pressure, because they had known me only in my previous role as a nurse. I thought, “Gosh, I'm supposed to know a heck of a lot more now.” So I put expectations on myself that I thought they would have for me. Actually, the physicians here have been very nurturing.
I was the first nurse practitioner at the clinic in 1991, and, although we have a number more now, I had to teach the doctors how my role had evolved. It turned out that I was a very welcome addition to the clinic staff, however, because the physicians were trying to handle their scheduled appointments and taking turns doing urgent care. It was very difficult for them, and they weren't happy about it. So I felt needed when I came back. It was hard at first because I was a new graduate, and I did need extra time, but they were willing to make an investment in me for their future benefit. They needed help most with urgent care, so that's where I started, and it really freed them up. I worked Monday through Friday in urgent care for about two years.
Doing just urgent care was challenging and exciting, and I loved coming up with diagnoses and treatments, but I missed having any continuity or follow-up with patients. And although providing urgent care was an ideal setting for learning more, by talking to the doctors and reviewing the charts, I simply didn't have the time for that. I was seeing patients constantly from the minute I arrived until way past the time to leave, and it wasn't fulfilling for me.
I wanted to develop longterm relationships with patients. That's why
It worked, and over time I have developed my own patients, who are pretty much exclusively mine unless they go to urgent care or can't get an appointment. The selection process by which patients and I choose each other is interesting. I've learned to know my own level of skill and experience and to recognize when I'm not the best provider for a certain patient. I can think of some complicated cases, like the woman with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, polycythemia, and depression—a lot of health problems. She was fed up with the traditional physician providers that she'd had in the past, and she desperately wanted me to handle her care. Some patients see me as a person they can talk to, who won't talk down to them. But I knew at the time that this case was very, very complicated, so I consulted frequently with a female internist here. When the internist retired and that link disappeared, I felt I needed to direct this patient to another level of care. The process of learning my limitations was just part of the growing process, the learning curve. But it was hard when I first started, because the physicians didn't know quite what a nurse practitioner was, and the public surely didn't. It was different when I did just urgent care, because those patients don't choose who sees them. When patients make an appointment, they're making a selection, so it's clearer.
Then there were the patients who didn't like the idea of having a nurse instead of a doctor, so that was really hard. A lot of older people, especially, felt this way, although they expressed it in many different ways. Some said point blank: “I don't want to see a nurse,” while others would say, “Oh, I thought I was seeing my doctor.” The first year was probably the roughest, when I still found a lot of people who preferred to be seen by doctors. By the second year the numbers dramatically declined, and after that I hardly ever saw it.
People have a mental picture of a nurse and a physician; they've been socialized into those roles through television and their own past experiences in hospitals, so their whole frame of mind about a nurse is totally different. Once I gave a talk about nursing and the advanced practice role to some high school juniors on Career Day. I did an experiment, going
I've had coworkers say, “Therese, can't we call you something? Isn't there a title we can use instead of your name?” The doctor is called a doctor, and that makes people feel comfortable; people are not used to calling the doctor Rick. We joke around about that, but those comments reflect a real problem in how the public sees advanced practice nurses. I still go by my first name, like most nurse practitioners that I know. A title might make some people feel more secure, but, on the flip side, people feel more comfortable and less distant using first names.
I think physicians often have a different perspective on patients than do members of the nursing profession. When Ford brings out a new model truck, they put it on a revolving table for the cameras. Then they show you pictures from the side, from the front, and from the back, so you can get a feeling for the whole vehicle. Health care providers, in our different domains, also see patients from different perspectives. I can tell you from my early nursing experience, physicians brought more of a disease perspective, while nurses seem to provide the health perspective. Now, because of the changing health care market, we're all trying to work toward disease prevention and health promotion, so those lines are getting more blurred.
I do think primary care physicians are better than specialists and subspecialists at viewing the patient as a complete person, as more than just the disease, the organ, or the organ system. But nurses bring their own skills as educators and communicators to their relationships with patients. The emphasis on education is one of our strongest points. Nurses also definitely bring more of a casemanagement perspective. I'd like to see everybody really put their money where their mouth was. We all talk about disease prevention and health promotion, but no one is willing to pay for it.
On a personal level, I do a lot of counseling on weight management and diabetes education. This is an arena that's separate and different from the clinical care being provided by physicians. I see patients who, with regular consultations on weight management and nutrition, are able to stop their medicines, with obvious benefit to the patient and to the
The community context is also very important from our perspective. Nurses don't look only at the patient; we want to look at how that patient is affected by or affects the family context, and then at the family within the community. That is part of our perspective.
I'd like to see doctors and nurses take advantage of their different perspectives and look at patients as a team. Some tasks can be done by either, so let's consider cost effectiveness and let the nurse practitioner handle some areas, freeing up physicians for other things. With a health care team, we could improve access. When you sign up for a provider, you should be signing up for a team of providers that shares the responsibility for your care. That's how I'd like to see it evolve, but people need to think in new ways. You don't need a bazooka to shoot a rabbit; a BB gun will work just fine. You don't need that much velocity to get the rabbit, and you don't always need a doctor for primary health care services.
Although many more women doctors are entering the workforce, they are not necessarily more comfortable than men are with the nurse practitioner model. Actually, it has been the male physicians, in my experience, who are more comfortable with the two roles, and it's the male physicians who often show more of the “nursey” qualities at our clinic. I can tell you that many of the female physicians I've worked with have not brought those qualities to their role. In fact, a woman entering medicine and moving through medical education may actually suppress some of the feminine qualities she would normally bring to her role because of the competitiveness of medical school.
Politically, because New Mexico is a rural state, nurse practitioners are very well accepted, although I've been told that not all clinics are as accepting as ours is. One problem in a salaried setting is a certain amount of economic competition. At a meeting in Albuquerque, I heard a family practice physician sounding very resistant to the role of the nurse practitioner in her team, feeling that her income is threatened by the nurse practitioner. It's not the nurse practitioner per se that she's resistant to; it's the fact that physicians are seeing fewer patients because people are seeing the nurse practitioner when they could be seeing her, and her paycheck is based on that.
Nurse practitioners have been in New Mexico a long time, and I don't think they're going to go away, despite competition among different types of health care providers. I think the system will retain a variety of
Here in our practice we provide both primary care and nonappointment urgent care. I see primary care as an ongoing relationship. You begin a relationship by doing a new patient history and physical, and both of you should identify needs to maintain or improve health care of that patient, with ongoing surveillance. Primary care includes health promotion, screening, and episodic care. It's more than just coming in for treatment of a sinus infection or for an annual Pap smear.
Some people here in Belen, including many older people, have a different point of view. Some people show up at a doctor's office and just want medicine. They've been accustomed to thinking that when you've got a cold, you just go in and get a shot. But they don't go in for screenings or for consistent follow-up for a particular problem like hypertension. There's still a large population here that is very episodic, and quick fixes are all they want out of the health care system.
Here at Presbyterian we see an economic cross-section of the community. Honestly speaking, the physicians I work with provide good primary care, meaning more than just episodic care and referrals to specialists. I've actually seen a change in the referral process over the last couple of years, both as a consumer and as a provider. As a consumer, I know when I need to see an ophthalmologist, and I don't want to go to a primary care provider first. I believe a lot of people share that view. But I've also seen physicians roll with the punches. I think at the beginning, when physicians were given the gatekeeper responsibility, they took it very seriously as a way to keep costs down. But in actual practice, the gates are now looser and physician referrals are multiplying because patients have demanded it.
Looking to the future, I don't see primary care being squeezed out by specialists. Consumers don't want to be seen as just a liver, a skeleton, or a heart. They want to be seen as a whole person. And I think that's what primary care and the health care team of physicians and non-physicians can provide. The hierarchical approach is old stuff. After we have educated consumers about the system, I think they may feel better cared for and not feel this need to reach for the specialist right away.
In the future I'd like to develop educational programs for diabetics and others, in an entrepreneurial sense. I'd like to be able to demonstrate the cost savings and get HMOs to recognize those programs and be willing
People know what a doctor does, but explaining the distinction between a nurse practitioner and a doctor isn't easy. It's so much easier to say, “I do what a doctor does.” But I don't like using a physician as a reference point. My family now basically understands what I do. My husband has been my biggest promoter among his extended family here—about how exciting my job is, and how elevated it is from what they see as a nurse. Some people still see a nurse is a nurse is a nurse. My mother-in-law, God bless her, I think she's just now figuring it out. Attitudes are hard to change. But the family has been very supportive, and they sacrificed a lot when I went to school. So I think they've had just as much commitment to this career as I have.
My boys are really ranch-oriented, and none has shown much interest in medicine or health care. They still have dreams of going into professional sports. My oldest is twenty and a student at UNM. My seventeen-year-old will study architecture or engineering if baseball doesn't work out. My youngest is working his way through high school. I thought that maybe I could get one of the boys to be a veterinarian, but it doesn't look promising. So, it will be interesting to see what they finally decide to do.
Twice recently, I visited Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque. The first time was to care for my nephew, who has muscular dystrophy. During my visit, I met hospital's peds intensivist, Dr. Rob Miller, and he told me how pleased he was to meet me finally since he'd been on the receiving end of so many hospital referrals of mine in the past. He really greeted me as a colleague. The other instance was when I traveled to Presbyterian to check on a newborn of one of my special prenatal patients. I walked into the nursery and introduced myself. All of the nurses looked up. “You're Therese Hidalgo?” one of them asked. “All your patients call you Doctor. All this time I thought you were a doctor.” I reassured them that I tell my patients over and over again that I'm a nurse practitioner. “I'm still a nurse,” I explained to them, “and proud of it.” One young nurse responded, “Well, you may be a nurse, but being a nurse practitioner is quite an accomplishment!”
Carl Toney bringing town and gown together in southern Maine.
CARL TONEY, P.A.
BUILDING A NEW PROFESSION
Portland, Maine
When Carl Toney returned from service as an Army medic in Vietnam, where he had patched bodies and saved lives, the only job he could get in health care was as a hospital orderly. The year was 1968. After suffering frustration and a few false starts, Toney discovered a new profession—the physician assistant—whose very reason for being was to put experienced and gifted people like him to work in health care. In 1979, he graduated from the nation's first and most prestigious physician assistant program at Duke University, and he has gone on to be a teacher, practitioner, and leader in the physician assistant movement. In 1993, he moved to Maine to work for the state's Department of Health, and he gained instant—and friendly—notoriety for being the only black in state government. Since 1994, Toney has worked for the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine, providing leadership to the school's Area Health Education program, physician assistant program, and statewide towngown relations. He is an affable man, with a drooping mustache flecked with gray, and sideburns that conjure an image of earlier years. The House of God, Disraeli, and The National Health Service Corps
IN AUGUST 1967 I WENT to Vietnam as a U.S. Army combat medic. There was an urgent need for medics in Vietnam because medics had the third shortest life expectancy in the war, behind officers and radio operators. The enemy's strategy was to identify the officer and kill him to destroy the chain of command. Next, the radio operator was targeted to disrupt communications, and finally the medics were targeted to prevent them from caring for wounded soldiers. The enemy knew that health care was important—a lesson I haven't forgotten.
Two years earlier, just a year after I graduated from high school, my mom had arranged for me to work as an orderly at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, close to my home in New York City. In 1966, I was drafted by the Army and enrolled in a training program for medics at Fort Riley in Kansas. I thought my training there was superb. The senior noncommissioned officers, who had already served in Korea and Vietnam, really focused on the type of situation in which we would find ourselves. Beyond medical skills, they taught me the importance of pragmatic decision making.
In Vietnam I served with a combat engineering group, a regular infantry unit, as well as a mechanized infantry unit. I served in the field virtually the entire year that I was there, working mostly in the area south of Saigon in the Mekong Delta, which saw a lot of action. I was there during the Tet Offensive, and we did a lot of support work for units in the Mekong Delta and central highlands. While I didn't enjoy the war, I learned a lot of medicine and liked being a medic. I learned how to take control of a chaotic situation. My role at the front line was to provide ongoing primary and preventive care services to allied troops and civilians and in combat situations to stabilize ill or wounded soldiers and arrange for medical evacuation (“Dustoff”) via helicopter. I thought that if I had to be there, at least I was doing something lifesupporting, rather than lifeending. Those of us who were out in the field saved many lives that otherwise would have been lost, despite high casualties.
About two and a half months into my tour, during an enemy assault at unit basecamp where I was temporarily assigned, I was wounded in the right knee and leg by a rifle grenade. I was pulled from the field for
I was born in 1947 and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, an area known as Washington Heights. My father, born and raised in Philadelphia, was a high school graduate who had worked for many years as a selftrained and self-employed electronics technician in Philadelphia and Newark, New Jersey. About the time I was born he began work at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City and stayed there for twenty-five years as a maintenance supervisor. My mother, also a high school graduate, spent most of her life working as a domestic; my half-sister (twenty-one years older) was a licensed practical nurse; and my half-brother (fifteen years older) was a career criminal. My parents were in their early forties when I was born, and I was raised essentially as an only child.
Our home, on 157th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam, was just a half a mile from Columbia Presbyterian, so the hospital was very much a part of our community. Our local family physician, Dr. Reginald Weir, epitomized what being a physician was all about. He still made house calls in the 1950s, when I was growing up. He was also the kind of physician who included the family in the decision making—in my case my mother, who was basically in charge of our family's health care. So Columbia Presbyterian and Dr. Weir were important factors in my growing up.
I started out in the footsteps of my father, who had been an electronics technician and engineer, by attending Samuel Gompers High School in the Bronx, one of two schools that offered a major in electronics. But the experience in Vietnam changed that course radically. The problem was that when I left the Army in 1968, I wasn't a doctor or a nurse, but I was something more than an orderly. There were no jobs for medics outside the military. I took a few months off and then went back to work at Columbia Presbyterian, essentially in my old job.
With the level of knowledge and experience I brought back from Vietnam, I soon began to feel frustrated as a general medicine orderly at the hospital. So, I left Columbia and went to New York Hospital for a brief stint at the Payne-Whitney Psychiatric Clinic as a psychiatric aide, which is another name for an orderly. I didn't find that job particularly rewarding
While I loved the four years I spent working in the cardiac ICU, I began to realize that this, too, was a professional “dead end.” In 1974 I began to rethink my options and considered nursing school, medical school, and something new called a “physician assistant.” There were a few P.A. programs around the country at that time, one of which was at Duke University, founded by Eugene Stead, M.D. I had first heard about this program while I was in Vietnam, from an article sent to me by a former head nurse from Columbia Presbyterian. She had been urging me to go to medical school, but sent information to me about this new profession in case I decided not to become a doctor.
In the early seventies, when I was thinking about what to do with my life, after considering and rejecting careers in both nursing and medicine, I remembered the P.A. profession and talked again to my former head nurse. She thought that the P.A. profession had a real future. Through her father, John Loeb, who coauthored the Cecil and Loeb Textbook of Medicine, she knew Eugene Stead and the program at Duke. She told me, “You really should become a P.A., and if you want to do it, you need to go to Duke.” I decided that the P.A. profession did hold the most promise for me, and I set my sights on Duke.
Having no college credits at the time, I enrolled at City College of New York to obtain the prerequisite courses and credits I would need to be eligible to go to Duke. I was keenly aware I came from a blue-collar background and that I was the first member of my family to go to college. City College was a challenge; I had to work fulltime to pay my way, and I studied a lot riding the subway commuting between work and school, but I loved it.
I did two years at City College, as a biology/psychology double major, and then applied for entrance to the Duke P.A. program. When I visited Duke, I remember thinking that it looked like every university I'd
The P.A. program was the hardest two years of my life, without a doubt. I almost didn't make it the first year, which was all didactic. My selfconfidence fell so low that I decided to leave when final exams came. Fortunately for me, the faculty did some wonderful crisis intervention and helped me make it to the second year. Because the second year consisted of clinical clerkships, I was back in my element and really blossomed. I went from almost flunking out in the first year to being the outstanding student of the 1979 graduating class. When I graduated I was absolutely convinced that a P.A. was the greatest thing to be, and that a Duke P.A. was the greatest P.A. of all.
There were forty-two students in my class, and more than a third had been emergency medical technicians, paramedics, or military corpsmen—many of the latter with combat experience. These people, along with the pharmacists and nurses in the class, had seen and done a lot. The medical school teaching faculty, from the attendings down to the house staff, had a lot of input in the P.A. program. Duke's philosophy was to teach using an applied model. P.A. students were seen as analogous to second-year medical students because that was when the second-year students did their initial clinical rotations. The program allowed the P.A. students to capitalize on their special skills. An informal collaborative bartering relationship evolved in which the P.A. students offered their technical skills and practical experience in return for indepth theoretical knowledge from the medical students, along the lines of, “I'll teach you how to start an IV if you'll help me understand acidbase balance a bit better.”
Being black, one concern I had about going to Duke was living in the South. Until then, my experience with southern racism had been limited to one brief week in South Carolina. To my surprise, I actually found being in the South a very positive experience. For one thing, people were far more honest in the South than in the North. They let you know their feelings and attitudes, whether they were positive or negative. You didn't have to guess, and, also to my surprise, I found a much greater sense of community, particularly among blacks. Even though I was a stranger with no family, no roots, and no connection to Durham or North Carolina, I felt as if I received a lot of informal support, and that I was a “member of the community”—this was very, very helpful.
In 1979, following my graduation from Duke, I entered a P.A. residency program in emergency medicine at the Maine Medical Center in Portland. This residency program was a pilot project sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Following a national competition six individuals were chosen for the charter class of residents, including two of us from Duke.
It was now my turn to experience life north of New York, and I loved that too. Maine was absolutely beautiful and the people were extraordinary. It was certainly the quietest place in America I'd ever been. I trained in both urban and rural settings, rotating through six hospitals across the state. Those experiences allowed me to learn a lot about emergency medicine, as well as a lot about the state of Maine, including an interesting social education because there were not very many blacks living in Maine at that time. In fact, it seemed as if I “met” and “treated” most of the blacks during the time I was there. They would hear about this black “doctor,” or “P.A.,” or “something,” who was working in the emergency room, and people would come in for treatment. When I went to a rural area such as Skowhegan, where black people hadn't lived for over a generation, families would come in to introduce their kids to a real black person. Everyone was very welcoming and accommodating wherever I went. Socially it was an extraordinary experience, and educationally it was a superb program.
When the program ended, I planned to stay in Maine and accept a contract I had been offered to staff a small rural emergency room. But at that time my wife, who I had met and married while I was at Duke, decided she wanted to go back to school and become a P.A. She had been a nurse for twelve years and felt she had done everything she could in clinical nursing. She had seen me go through the P.A. program and residency and had decided that being a P.A. would give her the knowledge base and level of patient care responsibility she wanted. She was accepted into the Duke P.A. program, at which time we reluctantly departed Maine and returned to Durham, North Carolina so that she could begin her studies.
Back at Duke, I was invited to join the Department of Community and Family Medicine's faculty at the medical school. I taught in the P.A. program, saw patients, and precepted second-year medical students and first-year family practice residents as a member of the attending staff within the department's Family Medicine Center.
Our chairman, Dr. Harvey Estes, who is a wonderful man and one of my mentors, emphasized education and service, particularly in the area
Even those P.A. graduates in the 1970s and 1980s who were increasingly recruited into specialty settings were more aware of primary care issues than typical medical students or residents. Unfortunately the marketplace, including local politics, often made it difficult for P.A.s to find primary care positions in locations of their choice, or at salaries that would allow them to meet their family financial responsibilities. Time and time again I would hear people say that they really wanted to go to a rural area, but either “I can't find a job” or “I've got all this debt, and this cardiology practice is willing to pay me much more; I've got a family to support.”
One thing that has been increasingly helpful is support from sources such as the National Health Services Corps. More students are now financing their training and education either through a scholarship program, through federal loan repayment programs, or federal and state partnership repayment programs. These options allow more people to attend and widen their choice of practice. But if the federal government had not stepped in—particularly at the level it did in 1971, when the Nixon administration supported a comprehensive health education bill that covered P.A.s and established family practice and nurse practitioners—I don't think that the P.A. profession would be where it is today. Some programs, such as Duke, were fortunate and quickly developed a significant amount of institutional funding that allowed them to wean themselves from federal support. Other programs, because of a lack of local resources, have had to maintain a close association with the federal government, a relationship that has been essential to the growth of the P.A. profession, but often at the price of financial and operational vulnerability.
My wife graduated from Duke in 1982 and decided she wanted to focus on women's health care. In early 1983 she moved to Atlanta to join the medical staff of Grady Hospital, the only public hospital among the city's forty-six hospitals, as the first P.A. assigned to their gyn emergency clinic. I continued teaching at Duke till the end of the calendar year, at which time I then moved to Atlanta to join her. Shortly after my arrival in Atlanta I joined the faculty of Emory University in the Department of Community and Family Medicine working with their P.A. program on
In June 1986 I decided that I'd had enough of academia after six and a half years and was ready to move back to fulltime clinical practice. I was looking for a communitybased primary care position. Some of my colleagues at Emory introduced me to Dr. Roy Wiggis, a general internist practicing at Piedmont Hospital, an Atlanta community hospital and a teaching site for Emory. Dr. Wiggins had just turned sixty and had been practicing in Atlanta for about thirty years. He was white; I'm black. He was from the South; I'm from the North. He was a capitalist and a conservative; I'm a socialist-leaning liberal. But our respective past professional experiences at Columbia in New York and Duke in North Carolina brought us together despite our differences. Dr. Wiggins went to medical school at Emory, did his internship and residency at Duke with Dr. Stead, and fellowship at Columbia. He noted during my interview the fact that we both had survived training under Dr. Stead, which said a lot about both of us; and if I was willing to put up with his capitalist, conservative ways, he would try to put up with my “radical socialist agenda.”
We had a very, very large practice which combined general internal medicine, occupational health, and geriatrics. Dr. Wiggins had three offices to cover, although he was basically a solo practitioner. When our practice was at its height, we were caring for five hundred geriatric patients spread out in five nursing homes across the breadth of Atlanta. We also had patients in the hospital, admitted through the general practice. So it was challenging and exhausting.
Our arrangement worked pretty well for four years. I enjoyed the patient contact, which is why I took up medicine in the first place. Nonetheless, over time I began to realize that I was feeling unfulfilled. I found that, although I recognized that it was important and relevant, reading medical journals bored me. On the other hand, it was intriguing to read a copy of the American Journal of Public Health or similar journals that covered health care and policy issues, because they approached things from a very different perspective. After all these years, I realized that it was the issues related to health care that so enthralled me, more than medicine, per se. So I went back to school on a parttime basis, enrolling at Georgia State University to finish working on my bachelor's degree. I majored in political science with a minor in philosophy to prepare for a career in health policy and planning, and in 1990 I received my A.B. degree.
In early 1991, after leaving Dr. Wiggins's practice, I joined the Georgia Department of Human Resources' Primary Health Care Section, as a “health manpower specialist.” In this capacity I was the state's liaison with the federal Bureau of Primary Health Care and the National Health Service Corps—two very important national programs assisting Georgia communities to deliver health care to poor populations. Georgia, a predominantly rural state composed of 159 counties, had a very large community and migrant health center system in place. Shortly after I joined the staff, the idea for the formal establishment of a state Office of Rural Health surfaced amid debate about how to staff it and where to locate it within state government. Fortunately, after a lot of negotiation, the governor decided to transform my office from the Primary Care Section into the state Office of Rural Health. Almost overnight our role expanded dramatically, and I got the opportunity to help take a leadership role in doing community-level primary care systems development statewide.
We made many decisions about the placement and use of primary care clinicians. We also inherited the J-1 Visa Physician Placement Program from the federal government at that time. This program sought to match foreign medical graduates with communities in need of a doctor. The foreign graduates who were completing residencies in this country with a visa obligation to return to their home countries would be given a waiver to remain in the United States in return for practicing medicine in needy communities. Until 1991, the program was administered at the federal level, but federal agencies decided they were being overwhelmed, and it made more sense to hand over the operational level to the states.
At the outset, we had to work hard to convince communities to consider the program, even desperate communities that were having trouble recruiting and retaining physicians. Finding foreign physicians did not prove difficult; in fact, I was inundated with unsolicited phone calls, faxes, and CVs from people around the country trying to find positions. The problem often turned out to be in keeping these doctors in the communities in which they'd agreed to work. The program's structure allowed people to obtain their visa waiver, abandon the program, and remain in the United States with impunity. Unfortunately, the federal agencies did not offer the states any support in pursuing sanctions to prevent this kind of visa abuse. Word that the federal government wouldn't enforce the sanctions traveled quickly through a sophisticated underground network. As a result, communities that had gotten their hopes up and rallied around
In 1993, I was selected for a U.S. Public Health Service Primary Care Policy Fellowship—a wonderful program that gave me a Washington-based short course in federal health policy and convinced me that I was ready to move on. My plan had always been to return to Maine, so my wife and I decided the time had come to make the move.
In the fall of 1993, following my completion of the fellowship, I returned to Maine and assumed the directorship of the state Bureau of Health's HIV/STD Prevention Program. My principal challenge was to create a greater awareness among policymakers and the general public about a set of diseases, which, though present in the state, were not viewed as significant public health/public policy issues. It was really difficult to convince communities, both people at risk and policymakers, that they desperately needed to deal with these issues. My job was to make that case.
To promote the HIV prevention program I met with infected individuals, AIDS service organizations, other community groups, community leaders, local physicians, and other service delivery folks. I would explain public health and the HIV issue and then listen to them. People were shocked because they very rarely saw anybody from state government, much less someone representing public health. They knew of an 800 number to call for information, but they were literally amazed to have somebody actually come to them and say, “I want to hear what you think about this situation.” I adopted that approach out of a sense of survival and because it really fit with my preference for face-to-face communication. Bit by bit people began to understand the nature of the problem and the availability of the program in Maine. With a good staff of ten people that I inherited, the program began to weave together crucial public-private partnerships.
I had a terrific time in that job for two reasons, both of which make me laugh because, while they seem to be liabilities, they actually proved to be assets. The first was the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, I was the only black in the entire state government at that time. There had been one before me. Even though I did not have a “high-profile” position, everybody knew who I was. But being black did not prove to be a problem at all. In fact, when I met people, they had more trouble with the fact that I could have lived in Maine before and left than with any
My mentor from Duke, Dr. Estes, always told me that when you take a new position, the first thing to do is look around for your replacement and get that person geared up. I identified a person who I felt would probably do a better longterm job than I would. And so I thought, “This is not a bad time. Everybody's excited. Leave while they're still engaged.”
In 1994, I left state government and joined the staff at the University of New England's College of Osteopathic Medicine, located in Biddeford, Maine, to become the associate director of Maine's statewide Area Health Education Center [AHEC] program. The AHEC is an exciting program that supports community-based clinical training for practicing clinicians and health profession students. It sends the students into the community where the action is and is very much in line with the work I'd done in Georgia previously. In June 1996, the university initiated a physician assistant program, and from then until January 2000 I served as its first director. We admitted twenty-seven students that first year, two-thirds from Maine and New Hampshire. It received full program accreditation in 1998, and we graduated 100 percent of our first class. In January 2000, I started a new job as coordinator of community projects for the University's College of Health Professions. I'm now based in Portland, Maine. The university is growing, the programs are growing, and I have the ultimate town-gown job, which is just right for me. Additionally, I am pursuing a master's degree in theological studies at the Bangor Theological Seminary.
As a society we continue to face daunting challenges in providing health care to all those who reside within our borders. In poor and rural states such as Maine this problem is particularly evident. Managed care, which seemed to hold such promise for Maine a few years ago, has failed to connect with the rural, elderly, or poor who represent our most vulnerable residents. I believe there needs to be serious consideration given to the future use of nonphysician providers such as physician assistants in meeting these problems. It is fair to say that the “experiment” of creating such a model of health provider has been a success. The lack of a cohesive public policy plan regarding how to integrate these providers into the health care team model, coupled with the dramatic and unbridled growth in the number of training programs (i.e., 1990–99 saw 100 percent increase in the number of P.A. programs nationally), however, creates a scenario of health professionals (physicians versus nonphysicians)
I believe that health policymakers are going to have to develop a rational and integrated approach to the distribution of health care personnel and resources. But, at the same time, health professionals, such as physician assistants, are going to have to challenge themselves to do better at defining our role, documenting our overall professional contributions, and justifying our existence in a competitive marketplace.
As a physician assistant, a health planner, a teacher, and a student I hope to help find the answers or, at the very least, to keep raising the questions.
Holly Gerlaugh working with a family.
HOLLY GERLAUGH, F.N.P., P.A.-C.
A ONE-WOMAN MERGER
Augusta, Maine
Since 1981, Holly Gerlaugh has taken care of patients and taught residents and medical students at the Maine-Dartmouth Family Practice Program in Augusta, Maine. She is a slim woman with bright blue eyes, a comforting smile, and a stethoscope perpetually draped around her neck. The Unitarian church, the Quaker meeting house, Albert Schweitzer, and motherhood have all been important influences on her. Her years as a practitioner and a teacher have been interspersed with work in Nicaragua and Jamaica and recent involvement in a statewide organization providing mediation services to families and groups.
Gerlaugh's professional credentials are unique. She is both a nurse practitioner and a physician assistant. Trained originally as a nurse practitioner, she worked for four years in Rochester, New York, at a community health center before moving to Maine to join the Maine-Dartmouth program. In 1985, worries about the future of independent practice for nonphysician clinicians as well as concern about infighting in the leadership of nursing led her to take and pass a challenge exam for certification as a physician assistant. Since that time she has been able to practice under
I READ ABOUT ALBERT SCHWEITZER when I was in elementary school. He became my hero. I wanted to go to a third-world country and be a doctor. But I was a long way from the third world. I spent the first eight years of my life in Ohio, outside Cincinnati. Then we moved to Florida, where my father was an engineer with the Apollo project.
There was a real sense of humanism in my family. Both my parents were very active in the Unitarian church. It was the church that encouraged me to see the importance of being the best possible human being I could and caring about people in my community. That message got transmitted through my parents and through the church. I got interested in the medicinal aspect of it through the readings that I did about medical missionaries, about the caring that they did for people who normally would not get those kinds of services. I did a fair amount of volunteer work in elementary through high school, working with kids. There was a Head Start program at a school right behind our house where I did volunteer work. I also worked with the Girl Scouts and did some tutoring.
I went to Cornell and majored in biology, thinking I would be a doctor. In high school and college, I worked on and off as an aide in nursing homes, and got a lot more experience in what the medical field was about. I worked in a large nursing home outside Syracuse for a couple of summers and then in some smaller private ones that were less well maintained and managed. I spent some time as an aide in an obgyn clinic for poor people. Then, in my junior year, I decided that it would be helpful to see a family doctor at work because that's what I wanted to be. I had become a Quaker when I was in college. One of the Quaker men was a family practitioner in Dryden, New York. I spent time with him in the summer of 1974 to see if this was what I wanted. He had a very rural practice, with his whole family involved in it. His wife had done the nursing care and the billing. They saw patients in the downstairs of their home. Through that experience I realized that I needed to rethink how much I was willing to devote to my job and my profession, versus the rest of my life—my religious life, spiritual development, community work, sports, and family life.
It seemed harder at that point for a woman. It was one thing for a man
I had found what I wanted. I applied, got in, and started right away. The university was based in Pleasantville, New York, but we worked with New York Medical College and did our clinical work in New York City. There were about twenty of us, almost all women. We ranged all over the place in age and background. The group had no nurses, but we had people with degrees in literature as well as people like myself with a science background. Most of us really didn't quite know what a nurse practitioner was and, frankly, neither did most of the people who were teaching us, because there hadn't been a lot of nurse practitioners trained. This was 1975, and we were the second class at Pace.
It definitely was a nursing environment and very different from the academic atmosphere that I'd been used to. It was a real shock for me to go from Cornell, where you were expected to be the best and the brightest and to excel as an individual, to a place where there was still a sense of hierarchy, of the doctor being the doctor and that nurses would still get up and give a chair to the doctor. In the training, as well as in the programs where we were working, we were in a system where the nurses were to do the doctor's beckoning, period. Very few of our teachers were nurse practitioners. They were very well educated, and had training and experience in different areas, but this whole new role was something that they were still trying to figure out. We were being asked to think independently, to start to be in the role of managing medical care, and yet the faculty was often teaching a model of hierarchy and memorization. In the clinical area they were teaching us to obey the doctor and not question the doctor's judgment. Some of us were inclined to say, “Wait a minute, we're independent thinkers here. We could be colleagues in this. We could help each other. We have things to offer, too.”
The program faculty taught that diagnosis was either “nursing” or “medical.” If the N.P. stayed within “nursing diagnosis,” then she was within the realm of her nursing license. If the N.P. performed a “medical diagnosis,” the N.P.'s work required medical supervision or oversight.
The program emphasized primary care and did a great job with it. There was a lot of emphasis on family dynamics, preventative care, patient education, counseling, as well as the medical side of the differential diagnosis. When I finished, I wanted to go to work in a health center. I knew that eventually I wanted to work in a rural area, but initially I needed to have on-the-job training because the internship that the program had provided was only three months long. I knew that I needed to spend the next couple of years learning more, so I wanted to be in a place where I could get a fair amount of feedback.
I was hired by the Anthony L. Jordan Health Center, a large clinical facility in Rochester, New York. The center had other nurse practitioners who'd been there for a while, and a good system of providing care that included social workers and outreach workers as well as N.P.s and M.D.s. They didn't have a slot for a family nurse practitioner, so I went to work in internal medicine. The center, itself, was built in the late sixties smack in the middle of the inner city in a housing project area. The population was very mixed—heavily black but also Puerto Rican and some Southeast Asians. In addition to health care, the center was intended to provide job opportunities for people in that area, because there weren't a lot of jobs there. They hired community people and put them to work as lab techs, medical assistants, and outreach workers. The entire patient population was divided among teams comprised of a physician, a nurse practitioner, and an outreach worker. We shared a social worker. It was an incredible facility, amazing. It had pediatrics, obgyn. It had a psychiatric center. It had dental, laboratory, pharmacy. Everything was right there. The center had funds to train people very quickly, get everybody with high school educations into training for their clinical work, lab tech, or whatever. They trained a number of people to become nurses from the community.
Since there were already nurse practitioners at the center, there were role models for me. The first year was difficult, though. There was a lot to learn. I worked by protocol—very much like a cookbook. I worked mainly with one physician, who was very, very helpful. It was a year of internship training, basically. At first the physician and I worked together, in that he would refer me cases that were routine. I'd see the callins and refer the tougher cases to him. Over time—I was there for three and a half years—I developed my own practice, using him as a consultant for out-of-control cases or diagnostic problems. Patients were very accepting of me and, with rare exceptions, seemed content to see whichever of us they had gotten to know.
It was very satisfying work. People in poorer neighborhoods are pretty sick and usually don't have a lot of access to someone to take them through a system—a system that can be pretty difficult. I think nurse practitioners are particularly good at helping people through the system, helping them make connections when they need to, to fit into other parts of the system when they need to. I got a lot of satisfaction out of seeing people make changes, get healthier, get care that I thought was pretty good care from the health center. We did home visits, too.
I enjoyed living in Rochester, and I succeeded in not being married to my profession. I was very active in the community at that time, and was editor of a small paper called the Empty Closet. It was the main paper for the Rochester group of both gay men and women. My partner at that time was also a nurse practitioner who was very involved in local politics. We set up a number of different programs trying to mediate complaints and problems between the gay community and the police. We were also active in setting up a chorus, singing groups, and organized a “Take Back the Night” campaign, promoting awareness of the problems women face on the streets. And we worked with prostitutes, a politically active group called Coyote. There were a number of gay prostitutes, both men and women, that had special problems that nobody had been paying attention to. I was also active in the Quaker Meeting in Rochester.
After a few years, 1979 or 1980, the funding at the center began to get tighter and the administration began subtly to push us to see more patients. They started printing out how many patients we saw each month, and I felt the pressure to see more. The center became much more of a mill. I felt that patient care was beginning to suffer when you asked that people be seen quickly, and there was less time to do home visits and deal with social issues that were causing the medical conditions in the first place. I was also having a hard time with the physician I was
But I still wanted to leave. I loved Rochester. It has some wonderful communities, but I really am a more rural person. So I was looking for a rural job. My concern, though, was that I saw people practicing rural medicine and getting out of touch and out of date. I wanted someplace that was rural, but would still allow me to stay up to date. A friend from Pace was working in Augusta, Maine, as an N.P. in a family practice center which was the home of the Maine-Dartmouth Family Practice residency program. She called me to say they had a job opening—and I jumped at it. That was February of 1981. I've been here ever since.
At that time, the Family Medicine Institute was in an old nurses' dormitory on the grounds of the Augusta General Hospital. We were very crowded. The dorm rooms were converted into exam rooms, except for one that served as an office for six or seven residents and myself. It was noisy, but it was what people called funky. We were divided into two teams for seeing patients. Each team had a supervising family doc, a nurse practitioner, and a group of residents. My job was to work with the second-year residents the most. A second-year resident was in charge of managing and covering the outpatient practice, and covering our patients in the hospital next door. I would back up the residents when they weren't available, in addition to having my own practice. Every month there would be a different resident who I'd work with. It was a complicated relationship, because I was in a teaching role and a colleague role as well as a nurse role. It required a lot of flexibility on my part. I had to be able to adapt to all the different personalities and problems and quirks that the resident brought, a resident being under the most stress that they're ever going to be—and people respond differently to that stress.
Sometimes it was difficult, and other times it was pure pleasure. The residents, in general, were a very dedicated group of people who, particularly in the early eighties, were very idealistic about wanting to be family docs, out there, rural, on the front lines. They wanted to be GPs in the old tradition. We called them “the granola group,” the people who were the idealists about family practice, and really were putting that first.
The decade of the eighties was a rough one, with a lot of changes in medicine. More and more people coming out of medical school were interested in going into research and specializing. There was a concern that we weren't going to get enough applicants. We were wondering if family practice was going by the wayside as more and more specialists were being trained. And then, suddenly, all hell broke loose, good hell. The payment schedule changed so that a surgeon gets paid the same amount as a family doc does when they do the same procedure. Well, that was just totally revolutionary to me. Everybody started talking about primary care. Within a matter of two years, we swung in the opposite direction and were deluged, by comparison, with applicants. This trend continued for a number of years. The numbers, however, have started to decline again in the last two years.
There were also legal changes that affected my practice over that same time. There was a lot of battling between the state medical society and the nurses and P.A.s about independent practice for “mid-level providers” and, particularly, chart signing rules. In the end, the sign-off requirements were relaxed, making practice for rural N.P.s and P.A.s easier but, for me, the changes meant that I had to have either a third-year resident or a faculty member sign my charts. As that happened, I stopped working as closely with the second-year residents, which was too bad because they didn't really get to see what an N.P. could do. I became more of an adviser for them and less of a colleague. And, in truth, as I became more experienced and realized that the residents had so little experience, it was hard for me to go to them for advice or refer patients to them for consults. I was tending to go more and more to my supervising physician.
The other big change for me came in 1984 when I decided to take the P.A. certification exam. It was the last year that you could be “grandfa-thered in” as a P.A. without having gone through a P.A. training program. There were some stirrings at the time about the possibility that Medicare was going to reimburse the P.A.s but not nurse practitioners. I thought that this was a bunch of baloney since we are often in the same jobs. I took the exam and I passed in the 99th percentile. So I felt like, “There. I've done it. I'm certified. If anybody questions whether they're going to reimburse me at one level, I can be either.”
There was another reason that getting certified as a P.A. appealed to me. I like the approach of the nurse practitioner in terms of the emphasis on the person, the patient education, and the counseling, and the primary care aspect. But I was not happy with nursing in general. Nurses at the national level were doing a lot of infighting. At the national level, there seemed to be a lot of emphasis on what “our role” was. People were always talking about the “role” of the nurse practitioner. We couldn't make a “medical diagnosis,” we had to make it a “nursing diagnosis.” As far as I'm concerned, that's rhetoric. The difference doesn't exist. I felt like we needed to take the bull by the horns and say what we are doing. We really are practicing medicine here.
You take nurses, a nurse in the emergency room. You start at a level of somebody who's basically only doing the bidding of the ordering physicians, an L.P.N. or two-year trained nurse. Then there is a person at the bachelor or master's level who can make their own judgments about a lot of situations. They anticipate what's going to be needed. They begin to make more of their own decisions. They can start to do more procedures. As a person's knowledge and experience develops, it seems silly to say that they can't do something because it's “practicing medicine.” Certainly they can learn all kinds of skills that have traditionally been medicine's domain. We need to get rid of all the confusion about who can practice medicine. Let's really talk about what we're doing. Are we competent or not?
In the seventies and eighties I thought that the nursing approach to developing the nurse practitioner role was wrong. I think that instead of trying to make it a separate role from physicians and medicine, we should be collaborating and working in a way that emphasizes the strengths we have so that we can work well with physicians. We should be developing a collaborative approach, not saying that we're somehow totally different.
The HMO influx into Maine has really made a change in providing care to families. When HMOs first came to Maine in the early 1990s, they were anxious to sign on primary care providers and were relatively accepting of nurse practitioners and physician assistants. But when national HMOs arrived in Maine, they wouldn't even consider signing us on as primary care providers. I couldn't believe that after more than twenty years of taking care of families our practice might be limited to walk-in care. The situation became increasingly confusing to patients and a bureaucratic nightmare for us. Legislation was the only answer, and we have it now, which has made our positions as nurse practitioners much stronger and clearer.
Over time I hope that the N.P. and P.A. professions will merge, much as osteopathic physicians and M.D.s have come together. They might still have some differences in terms of training and training programs, but they will function as variations on a theme. The residency program realizes that osteopaths often have a stronger training in primary care and specialty training in osteopathic treatment; the medical community has accepted them. The same thing can happen with N.P.s and P.A.s, that there are some differences in background but that basically we're talking about the same animal. I think that eventually it will happen.
I guess I've been something of a one-woman merger between professions. I am lucky to have found such a good spot here professionally and
I'm still very active in politics. Through the Quaker Meeting, I joined the Council of Churches and its legislative group that watches all the legislation that comes before the state. We review the legislation from the point of view of the churches and what their interests are. This is basically for the people who have no voice—the poor, mentally ill, mentally retarded, children, and the elderly. And there's a very active gay community here in Maine. Rural active is very different, I found, than city active but still, very active. And we've had a number of gay people come through the residency program who have stayed on as physicians to become a very strong part of the community here. It has been really a nice thing to see how a fairly conservative community can deal with all that.
In 1988, I took a year off and went to Nicaragua. I went down there to do my third-world medicine, something I always wanted to do. I saw what socialized medicine in Nicaragua was like; saw how it works and how it doesn't work. Nothing works when you have no money, that's one thing I learned. But it was a very good experience for me to see what was happening and what could be made to work almost on a shoestring. You know, you talk about running health care with a bake sale, that's about what was going on. It also taught me that in order to make a change in any community, you have to stay. You can't go somewhere for two weeks, two months, or two years; you have to be in it and be a part of the process and be willing to help make a community change. And they told me that, too. Their message to me was, “Go back to your own community. You've got a lot of work to do back there. Make the changes there because that's where it needs to happen in order to help us down here.” It was a year of a lot of growth for me, personally and professionally.
In 1997, I joined a local group working to provide free mediation to individuals in the community. We have now expanded to include a statewide network of groups that provide mediation services. We work in a number of areas, including landlord-tenant disagreements, human rights violations, and family and neighborhood altercations. We focus
When I look back at my younger days, my time in college, I wonder sometimes if I would have made a different career decision if I had been exposed to more role models of women in family practice, to all of the variation that people can do. Women have come into family practice and can develop a practice that is child-friendly and family-friendly. Here at the residency, we keep hoping that we are modeling different styles of practice and different kinds of residency opportunity. The faculty here is intent on demonstrating a style of practice that's healthy for the individual. Job sharing, leaves of absence, maternity leave, and paternity leave are all part of what we have done.
If I had that kind of vision back when I was in college, I think I might have continued on to medical school. Medicine really wasn't so accommodating then. But I don't regret it at all. I've actually ended up in the same place I think I would have ended up anyway. I love family practice, and I am thankful to the many people who have helped me arrive here.
5. The System Doctors
Managed Care and Primary Care
When the idea of primary care first became topical in the 1960s and 1970s, managed care as it exists today was not part of the American health scene. The first health maintenance organizations began as prepaid group health schemes in the 1930s and 1940s, cooperative health arrangements that were marginal in impact and generally considered subversive and offlimits by mainstream medicine. It was the Nixon administration in the early 1970s that first promoted health maintenance organizations, based on the persuasive rationale of Dr. Paul Ellwood, the Minnesota physician who coined the term HMO. The incentive structure in American medicine was wrong, Ellwood argued. Doctors should be paid to keep people well, and medical care should be organized to maintain patients' health. Although legislation was passed in 1973 that provided federal support for planning and starting HMOs, the organizations of the time were not-for-profit, heavily regulated, and generally eschewed by the medical community.
HMOs gained more prominence in the 1980s with the rapid growth of proprietary health care, which began with hospitals but quickly spread to all aspects of medical care. HMOs were natural candidates for commercial interests aiming to bring business practices to the medical care field and anxious to harvest profits from a sector judged to be disorganized and poorly managed. The rapid inflation in the cost of medical care in the late 1980s and early 1990s gave momentum to the idea that systematized, prospective management of patient care would constrain
By the late 1990s managed care—in its many, constantly evolving, and increasingly for-profit versions—had become a predominant force in American health care, with more than half the population enrolled in some form of it. Many physicians and some patient advocates judged this to be a sellout of American medicine to crass business interests that were wringing profits out of patient care in favor of stockholders and lavishly paid executives. To others, the ascent of HMOs represented a victory for rationality in health services because managed care emphasized prevention, ambulatory medicine, coordination of care, and the efficient use of resources. Its systematic approach to patient populations contrasted with the more haphazard style of private practice. To some managed care was a lady; to others it was a tiger.
The HMO movement had always relied on primary care because the capabilities of generalist practitioners coincide with many of the values and strategies of managed care. Most managed care plans are built around primary care providers who serve as the principal givers of care as well as the arbiters of specialty referrals. In the 1990s many managed care plans went further and assigned primary care providers the job of “gate-keeping,” mandating that they handle all clinical events and approve any referrals. In some systems, clinicians' incomes were tied to the number of referrals, lab tests, and hospitalizations they authorized, making the primary care physician the bearer of risk and a potential adversary of the sick patient. For a time these roles increased the power, prestige, and need for generalists, raising concerns among some specialists and the specialist-dominated medical education establishment of the country about an emergent new order. But as a backlash set in against managed care in the late 1990s, the primary care physician and the idea of primary care came under fire as well. Some patients bridled at being required to maintain close contact with their primary care provider in order to obtain any health services. Although primary care remains central to most health plans, many have relaxed their primary care requirement
While the rise of managed care has given primary care new currency as a clinical force, generalist physicians have also emerged as leaders, administrators, and owners of managed care enterprises. Their generalist skills have often served them well in managing health service organizations. The many accomplishments of medical generalists in the examination room and in the boardroom, however, have not immunized them from the ongoing controversies that surround managed care, as the stories in this chapter attest.
Sam Ho, M.D., has been an early, constant, and articulate advocate of the managed care “revolution.” He speaks with enthusiasm for the ability of managed care to recraft the system from one dominated by inefficiency and unfairness to a highly organized, participatory undertaking. His enthusiasm is not universal, however; some physicians, including some who have played leadership roles in developing HMO systems, are critical. An early convert to managed care and a teacher of its principles, Sallyann Bowman, M.D., has had what can only be described as a rough go. The battles between managed care behemoths in Philadelphia have wounded her and given her reason to question the implementation—if not the premises—of urban managed care. Gwen Halaas, M.D., works in Minneapolis, often considered the cradle of managed care. An early proponent, teacher, and administrator of managed care systems, she is now an opponent of for-profit HMOs and a frustrated observer of the backlash against managed care. All of these stories suggest an intimate but unsettled relationship between managed care and the generalist physician.
Sam Ho, charting the future at the head-quarters of PacifiCare Health Systems in Santa Ana, California.
SAM HO, M.D.
IDEALIST, INNOVATOR, ENTREPRENEUR
Los Angeles, California
Sam Ho, M.D., calls himself a practitioner of public health—private sec-tor, market-driven, equal-opportunity, for-profit public health. Ho is vice president and corporate medical director of PacifiCare Health Systems based in Santa Ana, California. In his early fifties, he is the corporate medical director of a company that employs tens of thousands of physicians under contract to provide health care to 4.5 million people in eleven states and Guam. His domain is not the traditional public-health realm of STD tracking and restaurant checks but rather what he calls “population medicine”—outcomes management, quality measurement, physician report cards, and the company's “clinical data warehouse.”
What the HMO movement has done is to privatize public health,” Ho states with enthusiasm. “Managed care brings discipline to our country's generally disorganized health care system that makes health promotion and disease prevention priorities in clinical care and requires the real management of the public's health care resources. That's practicing public health.”
Raised in a Chinese American family in Hawaii, the son of a general
Ho estimates that he is on the road over half the time, managing and troubleshooting, staying in touch by voice mail, e-mail, cell phone, and pager. In Washington and elsewhere, he represents PacifiCare to industry, professional, and political groups. Despite his schedule and the toughening times in the managed care industry, Ho describes his eighty-hour workweek with ebullience and a sense of excitement suggestive of a man half his age.
When the history of medicine in the twentieth century is written, the arrival of managed care will surely hold a prominent place. How will history judge managed care? Will it be viewed as overdue reform—the emergence of new and more rational principles for the management of health services—or will it be seen as a destructive aberration that dragged medicine into the venal world of capitalism, debasing its Hippocratic tradition? However the story is written, it will be a complicated one. Dr. Sam Ho—idealist, innovator, entrepreneur—will be part of that story.
WALKING WITH SOME COLLEGE FRIENDS on the North side of Chicago on a rainy night in 1970, I came across blood on the sidewalk. Lots of blood. A trail of blood in the pouring rain. The blood led up a stairway into a tenement and, halfway up the stairs, to a guy with a huge gash on the back of his head. My friends wanted to keep going, but I couldn't leave. The man was drunk and told me to get lost: “Don't bother me. Nobody wants to help a drunk.” I walked him to his room anyway, cleaned off his wound, and called an ambulance. Later that night I caught up with my friends, who thought I was nuts. But I remember thinking
I was born twenty years earlier in Honolulu. My father was a third-generation Chinese American in Honolulu, and my mom was first-generation from China. We were very much a mainstream Chinese American family. My father, in retrospect, served as a role model for me. He was a modest man who worked as a general practitioner with a blue-collar practice in Honolulu's Chinatown. Many of his patients were impoverished people—Chinese, Filipinos, Samoans, and ethnic Hawaiians. He had a solo practice with two examination rooms, a ceiling fan, and rattan furniture. I spent a lot of time in his office, particularly on Sundays after church. I saw his patients as they came out, saying, “Thank you.” He was very supportive of whatever their issues were. He was on call seven days a week, all hours of the night, and rarely, if ever, took vacations.
My father and mother met on a blind date in New England during World War II. They fell in love, married, and moved back to Honolulu. They were planning to go to China, where my father could practice medicine, but because of the revolution they stayed in Honolulu and started his practice there.
Some of my mom's family remained in China because they were patriots. My uncle, an engineer, stayed in Shanghai. Unfortunately, he was a victim of the repression in the fifties, and he died incarcerated. Another uncle, a physician and a medical school dean, was victimized during the Cultural Revolution but survived and is now retired.
My father and his practice were really important influences on me. Of course, I never would have admitted it at the time. I was a rebellious child of the sixties, and Dad was very strict. For many years the only thing I could talk to him about was baseball. We didn't have many points of similarity, politically or culturally.
I have two older sisters and a twin brother whom I had identified as being “Goody Twoshoes.” At an early age I was determined to be different. I got involved with nuclear disarmament when I was in the eighth grade. I followed the Civil Rights Movement, the Selma and Washington, D.C., marches in 1963 and 1964. I was active against the Vietnam War from the mid-60s. In 1968 I left Hawaii for Chicago to go to North-western
I entered Northwestern as a sociology major, thinking I wanted to be a teacher. But after deciding to be a physician that rainy night, I had to go back and take premed courses, summer school, the whole thing. In some ways I had a big advantage over other premed and, later, medical school students, because I knew exactly what I wanted to do and why. I'm sure such motivation helped me earn Phi Beta Kappa honors.
I went to medical school at Tufts because it turned out to be the best arrangement for both me and my future wife, who was entering graduate school at the same time. Although academic medicine in Boston was relatively hostile toward primary care, not to mention family practice, Tufts allowed me to customize an elective curriculum based on all the disciplines of family medicine in both my third and fourth years. I designed my own rotations in outpatient orthopedics, outpatient ophthalmology, obstetrics, minor surgery, and so on. In the Boston academic medical community of the 1970s, students were actively discouraged from going into primary care, especially family practice, if they had any semblance of professional potential. This professional intimidation only further reaffirmed my commitment to family medicine because it convinced me that specialists were being mass-produced by the Boston medical “factories,” which were not focused on the needs of the urban poor.
I was accepted in the family medicine residency at San Francisco General Hospital, and we moved to the Bay Area in the summer of 1976. I was happy to be training at a county hospital, finally doing what I had set out to do. During my residency, I helped develop an application for a National Health Service Corps site in a health manpower shortage area in a San Francisco neighborhood called Visitation Valley, an enclave of fifteen thousand Asians, Italians, and blacks with no physicians. We were formally designated a shortage area in 1980. When I had finished my residency, I volunteered for the National Health Service Corps and, with a partner, Dr. Toussaint Streat, opened the San Francisco Family Health Programs in Visitation Valley.
I loved the practice. We did real Marcus Welby medicine—obstetrics,
At the same time, I was actively involved in introducing one of the first HMO contracts to St. Luke's—an activity that was to have a big impact on my future. It was a Medicaid contract through a not-for-profit health maintenance organization called Rockridge Health Plan. Since 50 percent of my practice was MediCal [Medicaid] anyway, I felt prepaid health care through an HMO was logical, since it would provide expanded benefits for patients and also help me expand my patient base. I was excited about the new opportunities where we would be accountable for the health of an entire population, well or ill, including preventive services. Prepayment really supported public health goals. In fact, I thought then that an HMO merely reflected the privatization of public health.
We affiliated with four other family docs, making up a panel of six in several parts of the city. The hospital administration was neutral about the HMO contract, but all of the medical staff were absolutely against it. They saw it as stealing their patients and as some kind of conspiracy between the HMO and the medical school. They labeled me a pariah because I was bringing in an HMO contract that would potentially undermine their finances and a residency program that agitated typical town-gown issues.
In the years following 1983, I got increasingly involved in the HMO side of the practice. Rockridge was acquired by HealthAmerica, and HealthAmerica was subsequently acquired by Maxicare. The health management systems we had developed at Visitation Valley were good systems, providing preventive services, health fairs, and the use of nurse practitioners. Support from the National Health Service Corps helped a lot. I thought we should be able to export these systems. In my practice I was making an impact on two thousand people; through the HMO, I could indirectly impact twenty thousand people. What I sacrificed in direct patient interaction and satisfaction was offset by the reward of effective policy and program development which impacted more lives.
By 1986, I felt that I couldn't keep doing everything with any degree
I didn't have any formal training in public health, but, armed with practice data, I began to see trends—for instance, in the care for highrisk moms whom we could get into special prenatal care as early as possible. I also began to look at variability in medical practice. For example, in 1987 we developed a management grid that examined the referral patterns of different doctors. Some physicians made four or five times as many referrals as their colleagues working with the same patient population. This didn't tell us which rate was right, but suggested that we needed to develop some kind of standardization, some kind of bench-mark, so that we could have more consistent expectations of utilization and quality.
I enjoyed my work for Maxicare, but in 1988 I got a call from Dr. Dave Werdegar. Dave had been the chair of the family and community medicine department at UCSF during my residency, and later dean of the medical school, but when he called he was the health director of San Francisco city and county. In his own professorial way he asked, “Do you happen to know anybody, Sam, who's interested in and capable of organizing a primary care network? We're taking care of 100,000 people, but the care is really fragmented. We need somebody who can help organize our clinical activities into a primary care network.” It was a setup. I told him I wanted the job.
I was hired as the health department's medical director and eventually as the county health officer. The challenge was to convert a smorgasbord of disconnected delivery, administrative, and funding systems into an integrated primary care network. Instead of receiving care from one primary care provider, patients and families often had to travel to different clinics in different neighborhoods to receive services at different times on different days. I applied the systems development approach that I'd learned in the private sector. We created common systems for
By 1991 I'd worked in public health, academia, private practice, and managed care. I had become firmly convinced that change was going to have to come from the system level—not the individual level. Managed care dealt in population-based health improvement, promulgating the virtues of wellness and accountability among all stakeholders. The for-profit companies had commitments to capital markets and shareholders that were forcing them to innovate in order to succeed. It seemed to me—and still does—that the American entrepreneurial system offered real hope to reform the medical system.
HealthNet, a large California-based managed care company, had been trying to recruit me for several years. HealthNet was a relatively new venture that had been converted to a for-profit company in February 1991. It had the for-profit entrepreneurial drive for innovation, but its board still had a not-for-profit attitude. In the summer of 1991, when it was clear that the objectives I had set for myself at the health department were going to succeed, I accepted HealthNet's offer.
My initial job was as Northern California medical director. The delivery system was basically irrational. There was no clear focus on preventive care; incentives hadn't been aligned to reward improved outcomes; doctors weren't given the measurement or the data tools needed to practice better medicine. I went to work building clinical systems for the plan. A year later I accepted HealthNet's invitation to move to the main office in Southern California to reorganize statewide medical operations. As health plan medical director, I created programs in diabetes, preventive services, report cards, and physician compensation. Within another year I was promoted to senior vice president for health services in charge of contracting, provider services, and medical affairs.
Then HealthNet merged with a Colorado-based HMO, QualMed. Many of the programs I had worked to develop were quickly undermined
In July 1994, I decided to leave and, fortuitously, the next month got an unsolicited call from PacifiCare, HealthNet's second-largest competitor in California, offering me a similar job. The values and culture of the company were much more aligned with my values, so I jumped at the chance. PacifiCare's model is also a network-model HMO, contracting with medical groups, which in turn contract with physicians. PacifiCare puts a premium on collaborating with physicians. Not everybody in the leadership of PacifiCare understands the concepts of clinical epidemiology, population-based health outcomes, smallarea variation, provider profiling, and benchmarking. But they do understand the necessity of providing physicians with the skills, information, and tools to help them to practice better medicine.
PacifiCare currently has 4.5 million members, including 1 million Medicare HMO members, making it the largest Medicare HMO in the country. Initially I was involved in developing programs to improve physician performance and health outcomes. In 1997, I was promoted to vice president for quality initiatives and, in March 1998, to corporate medical director. I am now accountable for the strategic development of our national clinical quality initiatives, our clinical information store, national provider profiles, policy and legislative initiatives, NCQA accreditation, and medical liaison for national employer account sales. Although I average an eighty-hour, six-day week, I love my work. I believe in building an organization dedicated to improving the health and service outcomes. The way we improve outcomes is by working with physicians and members to give them the information, the metrics, and the incentives to continually improve quality.
Working in managed care means confronting controversy on a daily basis. Critics of managed care don't remember that the so-called good old days of medicine weren't so good. Old-style fee-for-service medicine produced unaffordable cost increases, less and less access to health care due to lack of affordable health insurance, and highly variable quality. Managed care has been a market response to the longstanding problem of virtually unlimited demand for services with a finite supply of resources.
For example, instead of the double-digit annual medical cost inflation of the late 1980s, managed care has helped hold medical cost inflation under 5 percent for the past several years. That amounts to a cumulative savings of over $600 billion, which has helped strengthen the general economy and the financial position of workers, employers, and investors.
Managed care has succeeded by establishing standardized performance measures and by actually improving health quality. One good example is mammography screening, which has increased from a national average of roughly 12 percent ten years ago to over 70 percent today, which means more women are having breast cancer detected earlier, when it's potentially curable. This has been a direct result of benefit coverage, minimum copayments, patient education, physician education, and health plan accountability.
Despite its successes, managed care has been controversial for multiple reasons. The fundamental contradiction in American medicine resides in the tension between autonomy for doctors and patients to make unrestricted choices versus quality control systems which continually improve clinical, service, and cost outcomes. We in managed care haven't yet been successful in communicating and balancing these polarities. So, when infinite demand is confronted with the reality of finite resources, people become upset and “shoot the messenger” without heeding the message. The media and legislators have generally played a reactionary role regarding anecdotes. Rather than focus on population-wide statistics, individual anecdotes have been given widespread publicity and credence. For example, if PacifiCare's membership were 99 percent satisfied with its services, thirty-five thousand people would still be unsatisfied, and the press could easily find complaints among that pool of members. Second, physicians, specialists in particular, have fueled the managed care backlash because managed care has forced them to be more accountable for their performance. Many specialists have seen their incomes decrease over the past few years. This is a long-overdue marketplace correction of the gross oversupply of specialists in this country.
Corporate salaries have been another flash point for HMO criticism, and I can understand that. But this is an industry and a highly competitive one, and it needs top talent. If an executive brings shareholder value to a corporation measured in billions of dollars, then executive compensation in the few million dollar range is competitive with other industries, and a relative pittance, compared with what the executive has earned for the shareholder. It's a concept of compensating leadership based on adding market value.
Medical education of the future needs to emphasize primary care. Primary care is better positioned than it ever has been to serve as the cost-effective, quality-oriented center of medical practice. But primary care today is not even close to what it will be, given the information revolution. Right now, the technology exists for an individual primary care physician to use a wireless, palm-top, electronic medical record that feeds into a server connected to a multidimensional database—a warehouse of information—which can help provide physicians with sophisticated realtime decision support. Armed with this device, the primary care physician will be able to provide pinpoint clinical care and tailor diagnostic evaluations, treatment plans, educational information, and anticipatory guidance to the patient. Patients, too, will be linked with customized health records, including evidence-based guidelines, flow charts, and information provided through “push” technology. Information technology will take primary care to a whole different level where the generalist really becomes an orchestra conductor for a huge symphony instead of a three- or five-piece band.
I've always been driven by a vision and a passion that has translated into long hours on the job. I've been fortunate to be able to engage in work that has been exhilarating, and I suppose I have a compulsive personality. My first wife and I were married for twenty years and remain close friends. She too has been long devoted to improving policy—in the area of educational reform. Our son is twenty-four and a law student at the University of California, Berkeley, intent on public-interest law. Our daughter is twenty, a junior in college, and majoring in communication studies.
My dad passed away 1991, after a long period of debility, but my mother is vigorously active in Honolulu. She had breast cancer and a mastectomy a few years ago and, two months later, went to New England for a high school reunion. She's a wonderful, wonderful role model with a deep and sincere joie de vivre.
I love what I'm doing and, for the foreseeable future, plan to keep doing it. HMOs have the most sophisticated understanding of the customer and marketplace, and therefore serve as a conduit from the market to physicians. So, in effect, managed care is an expression of consumerism in health care. Since consumerism has prevailed over the entire economy, we've seen more accountability and better performance in airline travel, banking services, restaurants and hotels, automobile manufacturing and service, retail stores, and software, to name a few. The same has begun to occur in medicine, in spite of widespread backlash. Performance measurements,
Sallyann Bowman and the city of Philadelphia.
SALLYANN BOWMAN, M.D.
A PHILADELPHIA STORY
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Sallyann Bowman's family has no doctors in it. Her father worked as a shipfitter, and her mother took care of research animals at the Philadelphia General Hospital, providing the youngster with her first encounter with the world of hospitals and medicine. She grew up in a neighborhood in transition from white to black, was educated at parochial schools, and had an intense teenage affair with the French horn. A series of prescient nuns and teachers pushed her toward science and medicine, a strongarming that Dr. Bowman applauds today.
Dr. Bowman, in her early fifties, is a neat, athletic woman with tinted glasses. She is a general internist who has spent much of her career on the staff of Hahnemann Medical School, teaching primary care internal medicine to students and residents. Since the early 1990s, in several different settings, she has been involved in the practice, teaching, and administration of managed care, an approach to the delivery of medical care of which she, unlike many of her colleagues, has been supportive. “Scared, confused, and undertrained” is the way she characterizes the interaction of many physicians with managed care. The system, nonetheless,
I DON'T LIKE TO SAY it, but I believe that the future of medicine in this country will be quite bleak without a rational system for health care delivery and financing. The future of medicine lies in the community rather than in a physician-led, hospital-centered delivery system. If we look carefully, the shift has already begun. Doctors will certainly have a key role to play in the systems of the future, but the traditional role of the physician will change. Physicians will be sharing patient management with others like nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and case managers. Physicians will have to adapt to the changes in communication and information management as never before. Are we really ready to manage via the Internet and e-mail? Some of us are still trying to acquire skills in telephone triage! Physicians are very likely to be the agents for micro-allocation of ever scarcer resources—a role that none of us is comfortable with.
Generalists are better prepared to make these changes than specialists. My view is, though, that as we strive to train generalists for this future we should be striving for a different set of skills than we have in the past. Adjustment to change, dealing with uncertainty, applying continuous quality improvement in patient management, responding to and giving feedback, leadership and team-building, collecting and responding to data are all critical skills for the generalist of the future.
I say all of this despite the fact that I have been beaten up by the system in recent years. Beaten up. I have worked in managed care settings; I have taught managed care. Eventually for-profit managed care squeezed the places I worked enough that I got spit out and left without a job. But I still don't see managed care as the culprit. The real problem in this country is that we've never had a system to allocate medical resources that worked. That vacuum has allowed the entrepreneurs and the profit takers to capture health care. There's no justification in my mind for anybody making $500,000 practicing medicine or, worse, running a health
Despite these concerns about the future, there's nothing I enjoy more than the practice of medicine. There still isn't anything I'd rather do with my clothes on than make a good diagnosis. I love it. I love all aspects of it. I've enjoyed every minute of being a general internist. I love being able to dabble in a little of this and a little of that, read a good cardiogram better than the cardiologist, or suggest a diagnosis and actually see it through. Over the years I have found that inpatient practice is less and less satisfying in large doses, in part because people are so sick. They are desperately ill, in so many ways—physically, spiritually, economically. By the time anybody lands in the hospital, they're desperate. And it's very taxing and demanding. The way I do it, I don't hold back when I'm there, and, I guess, also being a woman, people want to talk to you, so I end up spending an awful lot of time listening to people and letting them express their concerns or tell me their stories, or try to answer their questions. I enjoy that, but it's taxing physically.
I had no idea about any of this when I was growing up. No idea! I was born here in innercity Philadelphia. My father was a shipfitter; my mother was a homemaker. Dad had an eleventh-grade education, Mom tenth-grade. I remember my childhood as a happy childhood. Growing up in Philadelphia, you grew up on a block, so that there were ten, twenty kids on the block. My closest friends were the neighbors from down the street, across the street. It was almost like another community at the other end of the block. I remember summers being long, amazing, and lots of fun, filled with stuff to do. I was one of those kids that liked school. I went to parochial school. It was a big deal in those days for a black kid to go to parochial school. The neighborhood was primarily Irish and Italian, and the Catholic church was built by the Irish settlers in the area. There were only two or three of us who were African American at the time.
On my side of Lehigh Avenue, it was predominantly black. On the other side, it was predominantly white. Most of the black kids in the neighborhood went to the public schools. I was one of the few kids that went to the Catholic school. So that was the way it started in 1955, but
I remember in first grade the first time a girl called me black. I remember feeling stunned, and I got into a fight with her over it. So I went home and I told my mother, “This girl called me black.” And she said, “Well, you are black.” I said, “What do you mean, I'm black?” She said, “Well, you are. You're black and you're beautiful. If she calls you a nigger, then you slap the shit out of her, but otherwise, you are black.”
My mom's family worked in and around hospitals, in various capacities. My grandmother worked at the University of Pennsylvania in the medical school. She had a job that doesn't exist anymore. She would help set up experiments for the med students, and she would cater lunches and things like that. She was a general, allaround kind of “gofer” lady in the Penn med school, but she loved the job, so I heard her stories about working at “The University,” which is how we referred to it. You almost genuflect when you say it. My mom worked for a time at Philadelphia General Hospital as an animal caretaker. Since the animals need to be fed on the weekends, somebody needs to do that, so that was the job my mother had. I would go with her on Saturdays and Sundays to feed the animals. I can still remember the smell of the hallways of Philadelphia General Hospital. So I kind of always thought that I would end up somewhere in and around a hospital. I certainly didn't have an ambition to go to medical school. I just knew it would be something in science.
I was in parochial school all through grade school and then went to John W. Hallahan High School for Girls, the regional Catholic high school. It drew from all over Philadelphia. So there was a real mix of kids, again predominantly white. I loved the school. I loved it because I was a musician. I played French horn. I was introduced to the orchestra in the summer before my freshman year. I had never touched a French horn, but I heard a record, and I said, “What is that? It sounds really neat.” “That's a French horn.” I said, “Okay. Well, I'll play that.” Little did I know I was picking the hardest instrument to play. The nuns were amazing with us. They took kids who had never touched an instrument, and had you doing ensemble work at the end of the year. The orchestra was the center of my life in high school. We were up at 6:30 and into school by quarter after seven, so that we could get an hour's worth of practice in before homeroom started. Then every afternoon we had orchestra practice or instrumental practice of one sort or another. I
But the French horn wasn't my future. You can't play the French horn part-time and be successful at it. And you can't sit around playing it by yourself. I was going to go to pharmacy school. I had applied to Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, and I got in. I even had a little money. But there was an Irish builder in Philadelphia at the time named McCloskey who felt that it was important for him to support minority kids in their goals and aspirations for college, and so he had set up a scholarship fund for kids going to Catholic colleges in the area. I was sitting in my history class one day, and the nun said, “Sallyann, you should write an essay for this scholarship.” And I said, “But I'm going to Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, and I don't want to go to one of the Catholic schools.” But I wrote the essay anyway and won a four-year tuition and book scholarship at Chestnut Hill College. So I went off to Chestnut Hill, not having a clue what I was going to do.
Chestnut Hill is a women's college with about 120 in the entering class. I loved it. Absolutely loved it. Rolling campus, there's a creek that goes through. These old buildings; it's really a pretty, pretty campus. It was just what I needed. It was small. It was close enough to home that I didn't have to worry about getting to and from home, but it felt like it was away from home. I majored in chemistry, but I had no intention of going into medicine. Late in my junior year Sister Eleanor Marie—the credit is really due her—came through chem lab one day and said, “Sallyann. There's a conference at Women's Medical this weekend. I signed you up.”
I said, “But Sister, I really don't want to go to medical school.” “Well, you're going anyway.” So I went and I got enthusiastic about it. There was a room full of girls, and there were about five or six female physicians who were really excited and enthusiastic about being doctors. They had families, they had lives, they had other interests. They weren't hard and crusty and “guyless,” like you imagine lady doctors, you know, giving up everything for medicine. And that was the first time that I ever thought about it as a real possibility.
Although I didn't know it at the time, I think the other key factor was that my mother got breast cancer in 1969 when I was in my sophomore year at Chestnut Hill. Mother had a mastectomy, and three months after
I applied and got in to the new medical school at Penn State. We were the sixth class. But actually, it was the right decision for me, because the class size was small. The education was, I think, outstanding. Totally underrated. They really kicked our butts, but I think we got a lot out of it. The students were recruited with a push on family medicine. We had early patient contact in the first weeks of med school. I got assigned to a family my first week there, and had a preceptor my first week, and was in his office within the first month. It sort of kept you aware of why you were there, kept you in touch with why you're putting up with all the crap. So I loved it. I loved it at Hershey.
I know exactly the minute I chose internal medicine. I was on a neurology rotation and there was a gentleman there who was quadriplegic. He had a fracture of a cervical vertebra. Everybody else was going off about the neurologic lesion, and how the neurologic lesion did this and that, and what he couldn't do. And I wanted to know why he fell. It turned out, nobody had asked the question. He fell because he had a TIA [transient ischemic attack], a drop attack. Well, once I knew why he fell and what I needed to do about it, I could get excited about his neurologic lesion. That's what internists do—look at the big picture. That is when I decided on internal medicine. Never thought twice about it. But I knew I wanted to come back to the city. It was hard to be anonymous as an African American in Hershey at that time. I mean, just going to the grocery store, people would say, “Oh, you must be from the medical school.” You go to the movies, “Oh, you're from the medical center?” During medical school, I did two rotations at Martin Luther King Hospital in Watts in Los Angeles. It was wonderful. It was the first time that the only thing that distinguished me from others was how well I did what I did, and not because I was different because of the color of my skin, which is usually how you stand out. It was the first time I had worked among predominantly minority physicians. I was flabbergasted for the
I did come back to Philly—to the Albert Einstein Medical Center Northern Division as an intern in internal medicine. They put you through the internship, I believe, so the rest of your life pales in comparison in terms of the stress and sleep deprivation. It was okay. I got through it. The teachers were the specialists. Our perspective in those days was totally that of the hospital. We saw the community physicians as the dreaded “LMDs” [local medical doctors] who would drop in and interfere with what you and your teaching attending were trying to do. So I didn't have much of a relationship with community doctors at the hospital. And the expectation was that you do a specialty fellowship of some sort after the basic residency. I did a rheumatology rotation, liked it, and started a rheumatology fellowship. But I soon became frustrated functioning as a specialist, frustrated at not being able to treat uncontrolled hypertension when I found it, at diagnosing hypothyroidism in a young man with a wrist problem and having to send him back to the referring doc to get it treated. I wanted a more holistic or global approach to care. I wanted to be able to take care of people. Soon I knew I wasn't going to stay in rheumatology, but it was a good place to hide out for two years.
And then a job opened up in general internal medicine at Hahnemann. It was in town; I wanted to stay in town. I applied for it; I got it. And then I started getting excited about medical education. It was a whole new field, and I found out I loved teaching. The job was a staff position in general internal medicine. I was the internal medicine course director for the junior year of medical school—for seven years. It was just a whole new world of stuff. I still enjoy it. I'm one of those people that used to love getting dressed for graduation and sitting on the stage and watching the students go by as doctors. You've got a story for each and every one, as junior course director. They all came through your office, one way or another. I was very active clinically as well. I had four or five patient sessions a week, and made rounds twice a week. I was in the hospital seeing patients fifty weeks out of the year.
In 1985, I switched my clinical work from the university faculty practice to an HMO—HealthAmerica. I continued to teach halftime at the medical school, but I went to work for the rest of my time in a staff-model HMO. The HMO practice was structured; it wasn't happenstance. The HMO physician group was on the medical staff of the hospital that was two blocks away. They were good docs. Board certification was one of the requirements to be eligible for the position. I liked that. It was a
Once I got over my own personal culture shock, I said, “This is cool stuff, and we're not teaching it. We need to teach it.” It was 1986 or 1987 that we developed a managed care teaching module for sophomore students. I had a lot of fun with it, I really did. We developed patient problems, mostly around choosing health insurance. I took the same materials that we gave employees to make their choices about health insurance. It included a commercial Blue Cross option and one or two HMOs. One was a staff model, one was an independent practice association [IPA]. There were two different families. We'd say, “Here's family A, here's family B. You've got thirty minutes to choose a health insurance plan.” It was always amazing how students made their choices. They had their consumer hats on, of course, because that's all they have at that point. It was very interesting that the relationship with the doctor was at the bottom of the list of the things that medical students used to make decisions about insurance coverage. The first was affordability.
Most of what I learned about managed care, I learned through the newspapers, through the Wall Street Journal, through the New York Times, what was happening around the country, what was happening in Congress, what employers were saying about the cost of health care. That's where the debate was. The debate still isn't in the medical literature. The driving forces are coming from society as a whole.
In 1989, Hahnemann got a grant to set up a primary care internal medicine residency program—a program dedicated to training true internal medicine generalists. They asked me to come back fulltime to direct it. I said, “Absolutely,” because it was the first time that my experience clinically, academically, and pedagogically came together. This was
There was a change in the culture. More residents were choosing general internal medicine out of the program, and it wasn't because they didn't get fellowships. They decided they wanted to be primary care internists in their second year, and they stuck with it. But to really succeed at teaching primary care in a medical center, you've got to have leadership that is committed to a generalist focus. The leadership in the department was not committed to a generalist focus. Also I realized that the fact that I had not been involved in research and had not published much was catching up to me. I was going to need to make a professional career change because I would not have viability as a chair, or as a division director, or section chief, just because my CV was “too light” by traditional academic standards. So I knew that I would probably be looking at a managed care company, or hospital administration, or group medical directorship, as my next step.
I left the university and moved to Health Partners in November 1994. Health Partners was a not-for-profit IPA-type HMO with seven Philadelphia teaching hospitals as owners and seventeen or so other affiliated institutions with various degrees of risk. It was the third or fourth largest managedcare operation in the Philadelphia area and had a contract with the Department of Welfare to run a Medicaid managedcare program. The vast majority of the patients were Medicaid recipients.
I was the medical director for quality improvement, working on quality improvement and credentialing. The several thousand physicians in
I don't believe that managed care is a separate discipline. I believe that managed care is a layer of clinical practice that you do simultaneously with your care of the patient. To practice good managed care is good medical care. It's not too much and it's not too little. In the right managed care environment, you're doing it with more information than you ever had before. You have information on your prescribing patterns, on your financial utilization, on your hospital bed days, on the quality of care that you practice compared to your peers, on how many immunizations—age-appropriate and disease-appropriate immunizations—in your practice versus someone in a practice just like yours. I think that enhances your ability to practice good medicine.
There were critics of Medicaid managed care who claimed that we didn't provide the social service and community backup that, say, community health centers tried to provide. But the good part about the managed care system was that there was a battery of people available behind the company. We had expanded benefits that were not available under routine or fee-for-service medical assistance that even the community health centers didn't have. When the guy at the community health center saw a baby with fleabites, he told the parents to take the cat out of the house. But the kid came back three times with fleabites because the house needed to be fumigated and Medicaid and welfare did not pay for fumigation. But it made common sense for a Medicaid managed care plan to pay the bill for the exterminator—and we did.
Overall, I think managed care has a lot to offer the Medicaid population because basically care for poor people sucks. And I basically think that—I'm sorry—some of the medical brethren and sistren think that poor people deserve crappy medical care. It was not hard back then to see that what was coming down the road would be ugly. Unless the country got honest about health care delivery and made health care a right, the system was heading toward a debacle—HIV, geriatric care, underfunding, commercialism. This handwriting was on the wall. Unless we addressed those issues, the whole system would slip into crisis. There wouldn't be enough money to take care of anybody. Salaries obviously would drop, and care would get sketchier. I did think the generalist would be in a better position to survive, because the generalist has a different armamentarium of skills that would help pull a rabbit out of a hat when it comes to taking care of a patient. The clinician who is able to multitask, I always thought, would do better.
I stayed at Health Partners for about a year and a half, but it became clear that there were some cultural differences developing between me and the corporate environment. So in the fall of 1996 I moved to the Institute for Women's Health at the newly merged MCP-Hahnemann Medical School. The Institute included a Women's Health Education program, a Women's Executive Leadership in Medical Education program, and a clinical Center for Women's Health, where I went to work. I loved the work right from the start. I saw patients halftime and worked with other agencies around the university halftime to promote women's health and to try to develop women's health educational and clinical programs. We planned continuing medical education conferences around women's health. We set up a quality assurance system and revamped the budget of the office in an effort to bring it into closer line with the financial realities of clinical practice.
I loved my work, but trouble was coming. MCP-Hahnemann and the Institute for Women's Health were both owned and managed by a huge umbrella organization called Allegheny Health Education and Research Foundation [AHERF]. Unbeknownst to me and most everyone in Philadelphia, AHERF was failing financially. When a health care system implodes, it happens slowly and subtly. There weren't many warning signs along the way, but the organization was collapsing. I can see that now, but at the time it just appeared to be a series of setbacks that you couldn't quite explain or that you didn't get a good explanation from the administration.
I know exactly when the light came on for me. We were at a meeting
AHERF declared bankruptcy in July of 1998, and eventually Tenet, a for-profit hospital corporation, took over and kept our lights turned on. More recently, Drexel University took over the academic side of things. We were lucky that there was a great deal of university support for us to continue in our patient care mission, although we were threatened the whole time because our primary care practice could never quite seem to break even. In the months that followed, faculty were laid off, contracts were not renewed, we were constantly being scrutinized and second-guessed. I think the word is devastating. It was a devastating time. I stayed because I still had residents and students, I still had patients, and I still had hope that things were going to turn around. My greatest concern was to salvage the practice that I had been building since 1981.
Then, just before Thanksgiving 1999, we were given six months' notice. They told us that if we didn't meet certain financial targets we would not be reappointed on July 1, 2000. Our “financials” did improve, but the administration seemed determined to close us. I felt used by the medical school—and I was not alone. There were four primary care physicians not given reappointments, and all four were women. Now that might be coincidence, but it didn't seem like it to us. Two of the women were parttime, which made them particularly vulnerable. Racism is a harder call. I looked around the institution for which I had worked for eighteen years and wondered. Where were the African American physicians behind me at the medical school who would be able to carry on the mission of diversity and commitment to the minority community? I didn't see any.
It was certainly the finances of primary care that were at the heart of our problem. The practice itself wasn't worth a lot by medical market standards. Nobody was going to buy us or invest in us. Over the years,
The practice did not do a financial turnaround, and on July 1, 2000, the university terminated my contract. The hardest part of the last two months in the practice was having to say goodbye to the patients. Many were as devastated and unbelieving. They appealed to me to open a private practice, and when I couldn't, I felt like I was letting them down. I was furious that the administration seemed to care little for the relationships that my patients and I had built over the years. It was impossible not to take that personally. At the end I went to see the dean to let him know what I thought—that the loss of the Women's Health program, the other primary care internists, and me was a travesty. Before I left his office, he put his arm around me and told me that I had done a good job. It was patronizing as hell and sexist to boot. But, I hate to admit it, that little validation felt good.
I had no job. The whole ordeal had been a huge blow to my selfesteem. I had never been without a job since I was a teenager, when I'd worked at Gino's and McDonald's. But now nothing. I simply didn't have the money or the longevity to invest in starting a private practice. I had the credentials to get an administrative job in a managed care company, but my heart wasn't in that. I only enjoyed the corporate stuff to the extent that it related to advancing clinical practice. I always felt like I was an infiltrator in managed care—I learned the language, I learned the styles and the methodology so that I could bring it back, somehow, to primary care and make primary care viable. But I didn't want to do it again. I really like putting hands on patients and interacting with people's lives. I just couldn't see myself not practicing somehow.
So I went to the unemployment office and applied for benefits. I figured out too late that I needed to go in earlier than I did, so I lost a couple of weeks of checks—$374 a week. It helped. And I started looking for a job. I went to the usual places—the New England Journal of Medicine, the Annals of Internal Medicine, the Internet. But it was an ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer that did the trick—the Philadelphia Inquirer! I answered an ad for a Student Health Services physician at the University of Pennsylvania. They looked at me, and I looked at them, and it was a take. It was exactly what I needed. We take care of everybody on
I like being at Penn. I like the ambience and the energy that the students bring. It is actually a bit of a homecoming for me, since I was born in the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. Many members of my family, including my influential grandmother, worked here in a variety of lowtech, service jobs. I feel very connected to their spirits as I walk across campus.
Looking back over the past few years, I'm not bitter. I am sad, and I am disappointed. This is not what I had envisioned for myself ten years ago. It's not what I thought would happen. I wish I could get angry, but it's hard to get angry at anybody. Sharif and his crew are all gone, and the people who are still there are just struggling to survive. And I don't see managed care as my nemesis. It has brought principles and change to health care that are positive and overdue. It's the lack of a decent system to manage health care overall that gets to me. That and greed. And we have plenty of that.
Through my ups and downs, my home life has provided me safe haven and a great deal of joy. An important aspect of who I am in life and in medicine is that I'm gay. My partner Donna and I have been together since 1984. She's a pediatric OR nurse. I came out late in life. I was thirtyone. I had strictly heterosexual relationships throughout my twenties, which I enjoyed. But when I discovered that I was gay, I was comfortable with it and, being thirtyone, I was already in my career at that point. I didn't have the threats of exposure that younger gays and lesbians think about in medical school and in college and high school. I didn't have to go through that.
Donna has two children from her marriage who are in their twenties now. For many years we had them with us every other weekend and for two weeks in the summer. They were great kids, and now I think they're exceptionally nice men, even if I say so myself. I think they're caring, sensitive people, and they're finding their way in the world.
In 1988 when Donna and I had been together for four years, I had a retroperitoneal bleed from an angioma in my right kidney. It ruptured acutely, and I never knew I had it. I went into shock, got rushed to the hospital, and had five units of blood and a nephrectomy. But that night, that experience, and the look in my partner's eyes as I got wheeled into the operating room, I mean, if she could've yanked me back from hell, she would have. After that, it was, “I don't care. This is my family. This is the woman I love, and I don't care what other people think.” And so that politicized me, too. I was never really closeted. I think Rita Mae Brown had a term, “The closet door is open for anyone who wants to see.” I never denied being gay at work, but that event made it clear to everyone I worked with that my partner was conducting business for me. She was my support person. She was my significant other. And I had only positive experiences around that. So it was very heartening, that people came forward to help her and to help me who I never expected would have.
I became more radical when my best friend was diagnosed with HIV. John is as close to a soulmate as I've ever had. He felt bad about himself as a gay man. And I think because he felt bad about himself, he took risks that he shouldn't have taken. I was just so angry, and I'm still angry, at whatever it was that made him feel bad about himself, and not proud of himself. It's homophobia. I don't know another word to describe it. I mean, John was the most monogamous man in his heart and mind. That was his desire, but he would never have thought to have brought a male partner home to his family. That would have crushed them. So instead he took chances, and there was an epidemic out there that happened to get him. But I was so angry at that. His disease politicized me as a lesbian.
Then I got really political because of my affiliation with the lesbian doctors' group, the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, an organization founded by a friend of mine from medical school in the early 1980s. I went to the meetings most years, and I ran the 1993 meeting in Washington, D.C. That brought me out a little bit more, too, because the American College of Physicians Observer published an interview on me. So every internist in town, homophobe or not, read it. So it was like, “Hi. I'm the same gal you've always known and loved. There's no problem. What's different about me now?” Sometimes it's hard to be sure how people are reacting, but I certainly know of opportunities where other women have won out when my CV, in many areas, was stronger than theirs. There was only one person who was blatant enough to tell
I still don't think that there's anything more satisfying than taking care of patients. It's the one thing that's always at the forefront of my mind. When I haven't been sure of what will happen next or how I'm going to pay my bills, I'm sure I want to practice and teach medicine. I've been a teacher all these years. I will die a teacher. Someone asked me recently what I was most proud of professionally. My answer was … Bernie White. Bernie was a medical student of mine a few years ago. I first met him when he was applying to medical school. He was on the weak side, but there was something about him that I thought had promise as a physician. I pushed for his admission and worked with him as he struggled in school. It took me six years to get that boy through, including telephone calls at one o'clock in the morning for panic attacks before tests and countless dinners Sunday night at my house. But he made it. I had tears in my eyes at graduation when we hooded him—when I hooded him. He went out to the Wadsworth VA to do a medical internship—and he was Intern of the Year for his year. I'm most proud of him.
Gwen Halaas with her everpresent computer.
GWEN WAGSTROM HALAAS, M.D., M.B.A.
EVIDENCE-BASED DOCTORING
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Gwen Halaas says that managed care has always made sense to her. The cooperative and frugal principles that undergird the theory of managed care resonate well with her Swedish-Norwegian roots and the values of her social worker father and her minister husband. After medical school at Harvard, she returned to Minnesota to train in family medicine and, after time spent in private practice, took an academic job and enrolled in an M.B.A. program. Her growing interest in health systems led her to HealthPartners, a large not-for-profit HMO, where she became associate medical director in charge of medical policy in 1994. “It was a great job. I saw myself as a family physician helping to care for 800,000 people.” She felt she contributed to improved patient care, public health practice, and the careful use of the health care dollar.
But the backlash against managed care has affected Halaas. “I was spending too many of my days dealing with doctors' complaints about limits on their decision making, about having to take extra steps, whether it's just to look something up in a formulary or to get a preapproval.” In 1999 she left her administrative job and took up teaching fulltime,
MANAGED CARE. MANAGED CARE, MANAGED CARE. For almost my entire life in medicine, managed care has been the topic. I have learned it, practiced it, taught it, and managed, yes, managed it. More and more, it has become the subject of discussions and debates—not only in my work but also outside of my medical practice. How does it work? Does it deny people needed care, or is it, in fact, providing better and more comprehensive health care? Is it containing costs and making care more affordable or just making stockholders rich? Is it driving doctors out of medicine, or is it the blueprint for the rational and best practice of medicine in the future?
While some physicians have steadily resisted it, the transition to managed care here in Minnesota has been slow and steady. Even though things have been happening dramatically in the past few years, the stage was set for all of this to occur because prepaid group health insurance has been present in Minnesota since 1957. Minnesota state law requires all HMOs to be not-for-profit. Minnesota is a fight-for-the-underserved, benice, do-the-right-thing kind of culture. It's a very different environment for managed care here than elsewhere in the country.
As a young physician starting into practice, I wasn't particularly happy with managed care, having to deal with lots of rules and limitations and different formularies for different payers, and having my patients frustrated by being limited in their choices. But I was familiar with all of that even during residency, and I had found that part of learning how to take care of patients was learning something about their insurance. Doing so made the lives of both physician and patient easier. You just become accustomed to that as a way of life.
The more I got into it and chose to advocate for my patients with the medical directors of the plans, the more I realized that there were reasons for managed care plans doing what they do. The formularies didn't limit me from giving drugs I wanted, they just cut out some of the more
The medical directors I have dealt with over the years have understood about advocating for a particular patient. Most of the time they agreed with me and covered whatever it was that I thought appropriate, so I didn't really find it so terrible. What was most frustrating were patients who would insist that they needed to have a CAT scan because they had a headache, or a treatment for Lyme disease even though they didn't have any diagnosed Lyme disease. It's frustrating, because you want to meet their needs and make them happy, and explain to them some rationale for the decisions that you make, but they don't always leave happy in those circumstances.
Managed care has always made sense to me. Maybe it's my roots. I was born in and have lived almost my whole life in Minnesota—the Democrat-farm-labor state. My ancestry is a mix of Swedish and Norwegian. I was born in 1954 and grew up in Fargo-Moorhead, a border city with Fargo in North Dakota and Moorhead in Minnesota. My parents lived in Moorhead because they went to school at Concordia College and then stayed on. My dad was a social worker, and my mother became a school psychologist. Both are retired now. Fargo-Moorhead has a population of about 150,000 and is rich in colleges. There are three of them: Concordia College, North Dakota State University, and Moorhead State University. Growing up, there were a lot of cultural opportunities, rich in music, academic interests, and sports, but there weren't many professional women role models then.
I also went to Concordia College and majored in psychology and social work and minored in music. Medicine wasn't in my mind then. I met Mark Halaas, a handsome religion major and college student body president. We were married after my sophomore year, when I was nineteen. When he graduated from college he went to work as a college administrator, but he had always planned to go to the seminary. His father was a Lutheran pastor. He postponed the seminary to work when we were married. He worked in development, fundraising, and alumni relations at Concordia College. He went to seminary down the road a bit, when I was a medical resident.
We stayed in the area when I graduated. I took a job as a biofeedback therapist at the Neuropsychiatric Institute in Fargo and began working closely with a neurologist in the area of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis [Lou Gehrig's disease] and multiple sclerosis. I helped him write a book on
But, in truth, I liked science, and I came to like the idea of medicine. I only had Biology 101, so, while I kept working, I started my premed studies. When I finally applied in 1978, I got into the University of Minnesota and, much to my surprise and delight, Harvard Medical School. Going to Harvard was great but a little frightening because I had lived all my life in Moorhead. My husband came with me, but I didn't feel that I had the full support of my family, who were concerned that medical school was going to be too difficult for me and possibly end my marriage. Mark, in fact, considered attending seminary, but, in the process of interviewing there, was offered a job as a development officer for Boston University's School of Theology, which worked out very well for us both.
Early in medical school, I discovered that I really wasn't interested in the pursuit of science to the n th degree. I was more interested in people of all ages and what I could do to help them, which did not fit my previous ambitions in neurology. Slowly family practice emerged as my interest. I was familiar with family practice because Minnesota is a strong state for training family physicians, but there were only two family physicians in the city of Boston in the late 1970s, so I had little in the way of local mentors. I was, in fact, discouraged by the faculty, who were generally disappointed that I chose family medicine, which they deemed nonacademic and unrealistic. They tried to talk me out of it, but I had made up my mind. I knew that I wanted to work with the whole human span of life and I wanted to do prenatal care and obstetrics. I actually got more support from classmates than from the faculty. We had a great class that turned out one of the highest percentages of family practitioners ever from Harvard—twelve or so in a class of a hundred and thirty.
When I gave birth to my son, Per, in Boston during my second year of medical school and I didn't have any family there, it was a little lonely.
In my second year of residency, the administrators at Bethesda asked the residents if any of us were interested in setting up a practice in affiliation with the hospital. I was interested and so was Reid Gilbertson, one of my partners in the residency. We talked to the administration and they agreed to set us up in practice when we had finished the program.
We started from scratch in my second year of residency, picking out a practice location, designing the clinic, hiring staff, going through all the legal work and all the things required to hang out a shingle. The hospital talked us into practicing downtown in a highrise office building on the skyway, which is an enclosed bridge across Jackson Street in the center of St. Paul. This had never been done before. There were no family practice clinics downtown until St. Paul Family Physicians. I had the fun of being a pioneer without going rural. We opened our doors in September of 1985, one week after my third child, Erik, was born.
We designed the contract with the hospital so that we could opt out at the end of three years, because we didn't know what kind of practice we'd build downtown. But, in fact, we built a rather interesting practice that included young working people who enjoyed the clinic and brought their families, as well as the elderly and the handicapped who lived down-town. It turned out to be a wonderful, interesting place to practice, and ended up being a fullservice family practice, with just the two of us. We had a lot of fun. We were good friends and enjoyed each other and each other's patients. We admitted to Bethesda Lutheran Hospital, where we had done our residency.
In our second year in practice, however, we realized that the finances weren't as promising as we had hoped. Eventually we hired a financial consultant to help analyze the situation. We were not well trained in business, but we did know that we had a pretty busy clinic with a pretty good revenue stream. We weren't savvy enough to understand why business wasn't better for the work we were doing. The consultant concluded that the problem didn't have to do with the practice but, rather, with
In the end we concluded that we had to get out of the contract. This required us getting a lawyer and going through an unpleasant negotiation with the hospital. We already had been searching out other opportunities for where we could move our practice, because we had a good sense that we would take a lot of patients with us. We chose to join a larger group that had three sites, and in 1988 we moved our practice to a northern suburb of St. Paul, Vadnais Heights. It was a good practice, and we were gratified that most of our patients followed us.
I worked very hard, as did my partner. I had two other women partners initially, but they left, so I inherited many of their patients. I burned out with the OB, doing all my own deliveries, as I was up many nights out of the month, in addition to practicing in the clinic. It just got to be too much. The senior partners of the practice were all older men who were basically trying to work less, earn more, and eventually cash out, working the new partners hard until we could earn our way in. This was not unexpected, but there was a level of disrespect—some of it was toward me as a woman, some of it was just toward me as a younger partner—that I found difficult. Between working so hard and having to deal with some of that, I began to get frustrated and looked around to see what else I could do.
I had taught the whole time. I had started teaching parttime for the residency program at Bethesda Family Practice Clinic in 1986, in addition to my fulltime practice. On my day off, I precepted the residents. My partner kept saying, “Give up the teaching. You're crazy,” but I couldn't because I liked it so much. So finally a little light bulb went on that said, “Maybe you ought to teach. Try that fulltime.” I'd always thought I would teach eventually, but the time came sooner than I expected. In 1992, I left the practice and became the assistant director at my old program, the Bethesda Family Practice Residency Program.
Life was hectic with three active children. The reason I could do it was because of my husband's support and his willingness to be the primary parent for the children. He was a student at Luther Seminary when I was in residency, which gave him a little more flexibility in his schedule and the ability to do most of the childcare. When the children got a little older we had day care, but he has always been responsible for the daily needs of the kids. Once he graduated from seminary, he took a call
My experience as a woman in medicine has been good. I didn't think too much about it when I went to college. I thought I could be whatever I wanted to be. My parents instilled that in me. They expected me to go to graduate school, and they expected me to do whatever I wanted to do. My class at Harvard was about a third women, and I made some very good female friends there who were great role models. I can't say that I met very many good role models as women faculty. There were some who were too tough and not nice people, not sympathetic. Incidentally, there were no women's bathrooms in Harvard Medical School, only a powder room. It's probably still that way, for all I know. When I was pregnant, taking the physiology exam, I had to go to the bathroom and didn't want to walk for two blocks to the powder room, so I went in the faculty bathroom and thought I locked the door. The professor came in while I was there; he was a little embarrassed.
During residency, there were two women in our group of eight, and more women in other years, so we had a pretty good representation of women in family medicine. Training in family medicine was easier in that regard, because there was special respect for the family. Being a woman during medical training wasn't nearly as big an issue as when I got into the business of medicine. Once in the business of medicine, I suddenly experienced a change in approach and a lack of respect related to gender. When I had to negotiate contracts and issues with lawyers and hospital administrators, the traditional old boys' network became quite evident, and I had to become much more aggressive than was my natural style.
Having decided to teach, it was easy for me to go back to the residency where I was trained. Due to hospital mergers at that time, Bethesda
As it developed, I loved teaching, and I tried to develop new curricula in practice management and understanding managed care for the residents. The trouble was that the faculty who had been there for a long time didn't necessarily agree with some of my ideas for improving the clinic services, and they weren't very supportive of teaching the residents practice management or managed care. So I began to feel a level of discomfort again working in an environment where the kinds of things that I wanted to do weren't necessarily welcomed. I think a big part of it was that most of the faculty at the time hadn't practiced in a community setting for many years. They hadn't worked in a managed care environment, and they really didn't understand it. They were a little threatened by it, so they just weren't very supportive. It was as if they thought that managed care was going to vanish, so learning about it would be a waste of time. What I was proposing was hardly radical. Managed care has been on the scene in Minnesota for twentyfive years. When I trained it was already well under way. HMOs were in place, and we had to deal with many different managed care contracts, so we understood a lot of the details about how to deal with managed care just from having to do it.
In 1993 I was asked by the chairman of family practice at the university to become the medical director for UCare, the Medicaid managed care program that the department had developed. The job allowed me to continue to teach halftime in the residency program. On the management side at UCare, I learned a lot. I made decisions about coverage for the 35,000 Medicaid members in the program at the time. It was my responsibility to deal with issues about how those members were receiving
I developed a UCare 2000 Plan with preventive service goals, trying to maximize the rates of mammography, Pap smears, and other preventive services. Convincing this population to get preventive care services was difficult and required a lot of creative thinking. Although in the academic setting there was still some resistance to teaching about managed care and practice management, my work was being better received. I wanted to be able to teach at all six sites, rather than just the one, and have better opportunities for communicating with physicians.
I had been in the UCare medical director job for a year when I got a call from HealthPartners. HealthPartners is a family of the largest non-profit Minnesota health care organizations focused on improving the health of its members and the community. HealthPartners provides health care services, insurance, and HMO coverage to nearly 700,000 members. The job offer was for associate medical director of data management and quality and utilization management while maintaining a certain percentage of clinical time. I told them I wasn't much of a number cruncher, but I was interested in policy issues, in medical education, and in mental health coverage. So I was offered the job as associate medical director in charge of medical policy, and involved with developing medical education opportunities. I hadn't intended to change jobs, but this one was too good to refuse, so I took it. This was in September 1994.
HealthPartners is the merger of a staff-model HMO, Group Health, which dates from the 1950s; a group-model HMO formerly called Med-Centers; and, most recently, the Ramsey [now Regions] Hospital and Ramsey Faculty Associates, which is an academic teaching hospital that serves the underserved and the faculty practice. It's an interesting blend, with a very strong mission that is present everywhere you look. That mission is to improve the health of our members and our community.
That job was great. Twenty-five percent of the time I continued to see patients and precept the residents. That was important because in addition
I've been through managed care from the beginning. I learned about it, grew into it, and understand how it works clinically and administratively. I think most physicians my age are comfortable with the concept of managed care and understand the rules and how to play by them. At times, they may be frustrated for themselves or their patients, but on the whole the mental health of providers here has been pretty good, because managed care has been a rather gradual transition. I think it's been much harder in areas of the country where the changes have been more rapid and adjustments have not been nearly as easy.
In Minnesota we have grown beyond what others understand is the concept of managing the cost of care to understanding and improving population health, and that has made a tremendous difference for me and helps me sell managed care to physicians. It's exciting to be part of an organization that has developed practice guidelines that are very effective, that has set out public goals such as decreasing the rate of heart disease, diabetes, maternal-child complications, domestic violence, and dental caries. Our work goes beyond the usual managing cost to improving health.
A lot of the larger contracted care groups have been partners from the beginning in the development of the guidelines and are very active in patient education and health promotion activities. Does every physician buy into these goals? No. Salaried physicians, working in the staff-model HMO, may buy into these goals more easily, but so do many of our contracted physicians. I spent a lot of time working with the latter. I visited five of those clinical sites on a quarterly basis to work with the physicians
Public health goals should not be controversial. Everybody wants to increase early detection of breast cancer, decrease the rate of heart disease, and decrease the complications of diabetes. HealthPartners offers them resources that they wouldn't otherwise have. We give all of our clinics an updated list, on a quarterly basis, of all their women who haven't had mammography who should have, and of others needing preventive services. We try to make it easier for them to implement their own ways of improving their outreach and their ability to provide preventive services.
During my time as medical director for medical policy at Health-Partners, I was challenged to put my business education to work to help the health plan make difficult decisions about coverage. I developed principles for making exceptions to benefits—guidelines for medical directors to make exceptions based on the individual situations. I also developed a process for making coverage decisions about therapies that are new—beyond the experimental stage but not yet standard-of-care. This process involved reviewing the available scientific evidence and expert opinion about such therapies and coming to a decision about coverage.
These last years have not been an easy time for managed care. Despite the work of HealthPartners and other health plans in the United States in improving health and managing cost, the expectations of the public for health care services remain high, and the tolerance for managing cost and quality is almost nonexistent. I think that managed care has often made physicians better physicians because the demand for evidence, the demand for quality, has really helped them stay on their toes and do a better job. Managed care has also made physicians more costaware—something they didn't learn in medical school and haven't had the incentive to learn in practice. You can practice good medicine and still be costconscious.
But physicians are also feeling what they consider to be the loss of their autonomy. There's frustration with limits on decision making, about having to take extra steps, whether it's just to look something up in a formulary or to get a preapproval. The political campaign for a patients' bill of rights has come from these sentiments and, although I know that our practices at HealthPartners are well within any proposed legislation, it is very difficult to listen to all of this managed care bashing. And it comes from everywhere.
These attitudes literally drove me out of the work of being a medical
Resistance to managed care has remained fairly strong in academia. At the university there are still faculty who oppose managed care or who do not understand what it is. As a result, residents aren't necessarily understanding or supportive of managed care. This has resulted in Health-Partners' developing an Institute for Medical Education, designed to impact the curriculum and to train medical students and residents in the fundamental changes in funding and practice that are taking place. We want to teach managed care from the beginning, rather than having to reeducate physicians when they are hired. The university has been very receptive and has partnered with us in the development and work of the institute.
Specialist physicians are in a fight for their lives, here as elsewhere. Just as there have been too many hospital beds, there continue to be too many specialists. Within managed care, the specialists have had to play by the rules and have learned how to manage care, how to relate to primary care physicians, and what it means to be part of a gatekeeper system. But now their incomes are coming down, and they're not replacing the partners who are leaving. Competition has increased between groups, the potential loss of contracts with payers or hospitals has grown, and much more attention is being paid to the quality of specialists' outcomes and the cost of their care.
There is plenty of uncertainty in the system. Roles for primary care physicians continue to evolve. The concept of hospitalists is being developed. Delivery systems continue to struggle with the right balance of
My perspective these days is a bit discouraged. Like many administrators in managed care organizations, I have tabled my ambitious goals for reform, and I'm just waiting it out. I think managed care organizations in general are sitting back and watching while prices rise, while premiums go up—waiting to see where this managed care backlash will go. Ultimately, I think we will see a financial crisis or an access crisis—or both. It will take tragic stories and a lot of angry people to get any kind of response.
I believe that systems of managing care are the way of the future. The systems will get better. They may not look just like the systems we are building today, but they will have to be systems in which sensible people decide on rules and guidelines and tradeoffs. There is certainly a limit to the resources that we have available to pay for health care. If we really want to provide universal access and maintain or improve the quality of care, we have to have a systems approach. We have to think along the lines of population health and not just individual health. As a physician I haven't given up because I can still practice good medicine and I can still teach the principles of managed care to my students. It takes physicians to make good medical care work. We need all of the energy that physicians are currently using to get around the system redirected into evidencebased medicine and cost effectiveness. Then we will have a truly good system.
As for my own future, I've become much more involved in the ethics of health care related to policy and to the concept of providing fair and equitable health care benefits. So I'll continue to learn, although I'm trying to stay out of school. I may pursue more learning in the area of ethics and will continue to be a resource for other organizations that are trying to develop opportunities.
I will continue to be an advocate for informed and ethical decisions in health care. I have worked hard. I have also been able to enjoy my family. My husband, Mark, has combined his work in Lutheran ministry with fundraising and development work and is called by the bishops in Minneapolis and St. Paul to be a resource to congregations on giving gifts to the church and churchrelated charities and organizations. We have
I see myself as a caregiver and a person who is committed to leaving the world a better place. My Lutheran faith has always been a strong part of my family upbringing, and my religion supports me in my work. I get my reward from being able to make people's lives better.
6. The Quixote Factor
Generalists Doing Special Battle
The medical generalist is really a “clinician for all seasons.” Broadly educated and given to bigpicture concerns, generalists find their way into unusual areas of the medical enterprise. Add a sense of cause or moral purpose that motivates and nourishes many generalists, and some truly remarkable stories emerge—stories of medical Don Quixotes.
In the late 1970s, William Kapla, M.D., was a family physician concerned with the health issues of the gay community in San Francisco. Then AIDS erupted underneath him. The past twenty years of his life have been spent on the front lines of this new epidemic, grappling with its changing clinical and social personae and providing care to thousands of HIV/AIDS patients. Barbara RossLee, D.O., has been a onewoman civil rights movement, coming from modest roots in Detroit to become the first African American woman to serve as dean of an American medical school. Along the way she has broken many color and gender barriers. Janelle Goetcheus, M.D., has been guided by her religious faith in providing almost three decades of leadership to innercity primary care and community causes in the District of Columbia. The homeless, immigrants, mothers and children, and pretty much anyone down and out have been Goetcheus's patients and partners through her years of work. Primary care provides an avenue to take on virtually all of the challenges of the medical care system.
William Kapla instructs a patient.
WILLIAM KAPLA, M.D.
LIFE AND DEATH IN SAN FRANCISCO
San Francisco, California
Bill Kapla was a medical pioneer when he opened his office in San Francisco's Castro district in 1977 specializing in gay medicine. His predominantly male, homosexual patient population was troubled mostly by eminently treatable problems such as sexually transmitted diseases and hepatitis. As it turned out, he was at ground zero for the oncoming AIDS epidemic, and his doctoring was soon consumed by the care of the critically ill and the dying. Working with patients, public health officials, students, and researchers, Kapla has practiced his way through the epidemic, losing his lover as well as hundreds of patients and friends to the disease. Recalling these years, Kapla sits at a handsome mahogany desk amid statues, artwork, and neat piles of patient records and medical journals. Behind him is a bookcase containing Grant's Atlas of Anatomy, Osler's Principles of Internal Medicine, and the Physician's Desk Reference as well as an open case displaying a set of turn-of-the-century surgical instruments belonging to a long-deceased Colorado general practitioner. Kapla has a well-developed sense of history. He is an articulate, tidy man with a blond mustache who speaks with modesty about his accomplishments.
I FIRST BEGAN TO REALIZE I was gay when I was twelve or thirteen years old and I discovered that I was attracted to other boys. That made for a huge struggle within me. Could I really be bad, evil, sinful, perverted? I denied my instincts, and I fought to be “normal.” Being gay didn't fit with what I was being taught either by society or the church. How could God make such a despicable person as me when he was such an all-loving, omnipotent entity? I had no idea then that being gay would provide the overriding definition of my personal life as well, ultimately, of my professional life.
I was a good midwestern boy from a very modest background, born in Duluth, Minnesota, in March 1943. My father was an automobile mechanic who later worked overseeing quality control at construction projects. My mother worked in a grocery store checkout line. My parents were very loving, and I'm sure their goal in life was to raise their two sons as successfully as they could. Our family was Lutheran. We went to church and Sunday school regularly, and I said my prayers every night until, my God, I must have been in my second year in college.
We moved to a suburb of Denver when I was five or six, which is basically where I was reared and educated. The move from Minnesota to Colorado was very exciting. I loved cowboys and Indians, and here we were moving out West where the real Indians lived. My father used to rent a horse for me and walk alongside when I was too small to ride on my own. Then I began to ride seriously on my own, and to this day riding is my great passion.
My first recollection of an interest in medicine dates from when I was about eight years old. My mother, brother, and I were playing a board game, and I asked my mother what she would have chosen if she could have married anyone. She said, “Oh, sweetheart, every young girl wants to marry a doctor.” From that point on, I planned on medical school. By junior high, whenever I was asked, “What are you going to be?” the answer was always, “I'm going to be a doctor.” All my courses from high school on were directed toward premed.
I went to college at the University of Colorado, a gorgeous campus in Boulder with beautiful flagstone buildings. My years there were among the most positive of my life. I worked very hard, enjoyed the school, earned a B.A. in psychology, and was accepted at the University
At the same time, it was a tremendous struggle. I felt extreme isolation and fear that something would happen to me physically. Disease was not the issue then, it was physical harm. To this day, when a gay man of my generation walks along the street, all he needs to hear is “Hey, faggot,” somewhere in the background, and he'll think, “Oh, dear, my time to die!” Straight people may not be aware of it, but queers still get bashed for the sport of it. So growing up in the 1950s and 60s was terrifying.
I was dealing with these issues with the help of a counselor in college. Then, on the first day of medical school, we were all in the auditorium being asked to sign a bunch of papers, and one paper came by that was an attestation to “moral character.” It asked if we were free of any character disorders, and said that any knowledge to the contrary would be grounds for immediate expulsion. Well, I knew what they meant by a character disorder, and I said to myself, “Oh, my God. Sign that puppy and move it along.” That was the kind of anxiety that was ever present in medical school. In the second year of medical school, the top student in the class was gay. His mother and father knew it and were promising him a Corvette if he changed his sexuality. The stress of being gay led him to commit suicide in the fraternity house. The school was in an uproar; no one could understand why he had killed himself. I knew. So I went to the dean of students wanting to inform him but not to incriminate myself, and he was actually understanding and sympathetic. I told him about the stresses on gay students and reminded him about the “moral character” paper we had had to sign the first day. He seemed understanding, and there were no repercussions from our talk. I felt that maybe the conversation had accomplished something.
Dating was also stressful. In the second year of medical school, I was going out with a nursing student for the sake of having a girlfriend, and we tried having sex. It was dark and it was a struggle, an absolute struggle, but I finally had an orgasm in my clothes on the floor of her apartment. When it was all over, I got up, said I had to go, and walked home. Then I got in my car, went down to a gay bar in Denver, and went home with some nice guy. Then and there I decided that I wasn't going to play
My next crisis came in the fourth year, on a psychiatric rotation. A hospitalized psychiatric patient recognized me from a gay bar and told his attending psychiatrist that the medical student was a faggot. I was called in to the attending's office and told, “Well, this is pretty serious. We're going to have to take you off the rotation and tell the other students why this is happening.” First I denied it. Then I said, “Well, there was a time when I probably was considering it, but I'm going with a nursing student.” I still had contact with Nancy, thank God, so I could use her as an alibi. Eventually the attending physician decided that his response had been too harsh and that he would treat the issue as a problem of the patient. I think his dilemma then (it was the mid sixties) was, “Is this student gay and, if so, what are our procedures for dealing with him?” But since I denied it, it let him off the hook. Had I admitted being gay, I'm not sure what would have happened. My fear was that it would have meant expulsion. The incident left me panicky—I was within six months of becoming a doctor, and I thought I was going to lose it all. I went to talk to a psychiatrist friend on the faculty who brought me back down to earth. He just said, “Calm down, don't do anything, don't say anything, and don't admit to anything. Everything will be all right.” And in fact, it was. I graduated and went on through.
In 1969, I moved to San Francisco to start residency training in internal medicine at Presbyterian Hospital. Originally I'd planned to go east for my residency, since I'd spent all of my life west of the Mississippi. But a girlfriend pushed me to consider San Francisco. She claimed that it was a wonderful city, but my impression at the time was that it was a city full of kooks. In the third year of medical school, a friend and I took a trip to California with the idea of looking at residency programs. We arrived in San Francisco for an interview, stayed at the YMCA, which was a notorious gay hangout, and we just went crazy. We spent the entire week in San Francisco, never going on to Los Angeles, because we loved the city so much. When I applied for internships, all of them were within a hundred miles of San Francisco, and I was matched with Presbyterian.
After two years of residency, I joined the Navy. It was 1971, the war in Vietnam was raging, and all doctors had to serve in the military. I chose the Navy because, in my mind, it had more gay people than any other service. I did worry that I'd be shipped to Vietnam and die, but instead I spent six months in Pensacola, Florida, being trained as a flight surgeon,
The Marines and the Marine Corps were wonderful. The image of the Marines appealed to my own personal values and to my sexual fantasies. Presumptions aside, if you are a neat, clean, squaredaway person, they'll ask you to wear their uniform. Well, I wore a Marine Corps uniform the entire time I was in the service. I'm adaptable and try to be an engaging person, so I had no problem with the military. It was easier for me because I knew I wasn't going to stay there. I like orderliness well enough, but it was still hard. I knew that I couldn't stay in the military twenty years and be gay—although, to my great surprise, I met a lot of gay people and realized that the Marine Corps attracted many, many gay men. Of course the word “men” wasn't quite right since many of the Marines were actually still adolescent boys with questions about their sexuality. The camaraderie and all the buddy business appealed to the homosexual tendencies in many young men. Unfortunately the Marines were also viciously brutal if they caught a gay guy in the Corps; they would humiliate him and destroy his career. Homosexuality exists in the Marine Corps, but it's dealt with harshly when it's discovered.
I enjoyed my time in the military because, first, I wasn't going to be there forever and, second, I was always a doctor first and a military officer second. I had tremendous rapport with the troops and the officers. People knew I wasn't a “lifer,” so they could come to me if they had problems. Within the underground it was known that I was gay, so that gay troops tended to come to me when there was a problem or issue.
I spent six months aboard a helicopter aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. People got very gay aboard a ship. In the ship's setting, where there's no other outlet, sexual contact with a man wasn't viewed as badly as it was off the ship, when the standard roles reassert themselves again. I think that we probably respond to each other first as human beings, irrespective of gender, on a big bell-shaped curve. There are probably a few pure homosexuals among us, a few pure heterosexuals, and most of us are bisexual. When you add the influence of society, history, and religion, it skews that curve markedly toward heterosexuality. It's interesting to note that 25 percent of gay men have children and that many men “come out” only after a marriage. On board a ship, you could see that curve move back toward the middle.
I got out of the Marines without destroying the moral fiber and character of the military and headed back to San Francisco, where I worked as an ER doctor for four years, taking lots of side courses. I found that
During my four years working in the ER, many friends had wanted me to care for them, but the only thing I could do was to bring them through the emergency room and deal with them there. In the process, I was actually creating a very nice gay practice. It finally reached a critical mass, and psychologically I was ready to really deal with people that I liked. So in 1978 I started a primary care practice and forthrightly called it a gay practice in the Nob Hill neighborhood near St. Francis Hospital. I immediately became one of the few doctors in the city specializing in gay health. Herb Caen, the famous columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, picked up on it immediately. His comment in the paper on gay medicine was that, “I thought you had to be sad, hurt, or in pain to go to the doctor, and here you can be gay and go to the doctor.”
The practice was probably 90 percent gay men and 10 percent lesbians. The patients loved it because, in general, medicine had had no time for gay and lesbian patients. Their sexual preference was seen as a disease itself. Doctors wanted to send homosexual patients for shock therapy. For the most part gay patients had to keep that aspect of themselves secret from the medical profession. In my practice I saw the whole gamut of health problems that affect twenty- to forty-year-olds. On top of that, I saw a horrendous incidence of sexually transmitted disease. This was the sexual free-for-all time when the gay male was becoming a person unto himself, with a new attitude: “No one's going to tell me what to do; I'm going to have sex with whomever, whenever, wherever, I want to.” So I dealt with the STDs quietly. I also became the community's expert on ambulatory proctology because no proctologist wanted to deal with a faggot and his problems.
I reported the STDs to the Health Department, of course. They were obviously concerned about the STD rate, and a wonderful assistant director of the Health Department named Selma Dritz reached out in a motherly way to the gay community. She wanted to know why there were so many cases of parasites in San Francisco, and she thought that maybe it was originating in the gay community. So a rapport was established, and we fastidiously reported all of the odd parasites we discovered to Selma. She started characterizing enteric parasites on a public health basis and producing papers and epidemiological studies. The rapport we
The practice was successful. I didn't know much about how to run a business, but it all seemed to work out. I was all alone until 1984, when I moved to Davies Medical Center in the heart of the Castro, ground zero of the gay community in the world, and two of us joined together to form one practice. I enjoyed being on the crest of the wave of gay issues and gay medicine. I became an expert in caring for the gay patient and was asked to give talks on the subject to interns and residents and medical societies. It became steadily more topical because physicians began to ask, “Oh, my God, you mean I've got faggots in my practice?” And my answer was, “You'd better believe you do—now, here's the way to deal with it.” So that was fun.
Around the same time the gay physicians in San Francisco got together to create a gay physicians' support group, the first in the country. These groups now exist in other major areas, and there's a national organization. We couldn't use the name “gay” or anything like it so, to this day, it's called Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights. The fear was always state reprisals—that the medical board of California would take our licenses away. The medical society of the city of San Francisco would not even allow the gay physicians' association to meet in its building until 1980; they were not going to let faggot doctors in the building. The attitude of organized medicine has been conservative, prejudicial, and slow to change. The American Psychological Association listed homosexuality as a disease until 1974. The following year the AMA finally agreed that homosexuality was not a disease category. The AIDS epidemic has helped a great deal in sensitizing people to the rights of gays.
As soon as I became board-certified in family medicine I was appointed to the clinical faculty at the University of California at San Francisco Medical School. Being gay was not an issue there. At first, gay students heard about my practice through the underground, and started taking electives with me. The rotation became so popular that we started getting straight students as well. I do feel a special obligation, however, to help gay students. It's important to show them a role model that says, “Hey, you can be as gay as you want to and still be successful.”
After the gay physicians got permission to go into the medical society's building, we held a continuing medical education course there on gay medicine. No one else was going to teach us, so we made our own course. In August 1981, Dr. Friedman Keene from New York City came to San Francisco to present a talk on a strange cancer—Kaposi's sarcoma—that he
We had no name for it. It was just a disease complex that was happening—and it was happening in homosexuals. A few bad apples, but not us. Then in 1982 one of our physicians developed a Kaposi's lesion in the back of his throat, and he was dead in two years. In terms of my own practice, it was unbelievable. I remember a horrifying case. I had to tell a nice young man I had taken care of, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, that his HIV test result was positive. He seemed devastated, but after we talked about it he seemed okay. The following morning I got a call from the coroner: “Could you come down, Dr. Kapla, and identify a body that we cut from a tree in Golden Gate Park?” I couldn't do a thing about it. Some of the finest, most talented, educated, successful people were dying—and no one cared. When you're seventy or eighty, with diabetes and heart failure, and you die, everybody says, “Oh God, wasn't it a blessing.” If you're thirty-two and die, they say, “Good, he was a faggot. … It was God's revenge. … It was deserved.”
Early on, we started to have struggles with bathhouses here in San Francisco. Bathhouses were viewed as the bed of this disease, so there was a movement to close them. But we couldn't just close our sanctuaries, our palaces. The debate was emotional, passionate, vociferous—it was terrible. There was a sense of entitlement: “You can't tell us what to do and put moral restrictions on us.” We knew that when a guy checked into a bathhouse, he got a towel and key, put his clothes into a locker, and then went around and did whatever he wanted to with consenting males. We knew from exit surveys that someone who went to a bathhouse had an orgasm on average two and a half times each trip. Epidemiologically, he came in contact with about twenty people for each orgasm. So he essentially had sex with fifty people each visit. We have on record people with three and four thousand one-on-one contacts in the early days of the epidemic. This became the staggering geometric progression of the active gay male in San Francisco in the seventies. And no one wanted to stop.
In retrospect, it's easy to see how AIDS just exploded in the gay community.
Clinically there were slow but important steps in dealing with AIDS, and by 1984 we were able to test for the disease. But testing could lead to a loss of job and health insurance and make a bad situation terrible. The advent of anonymous testing was a godsend, because we could test people without destroying their lives. But we didn't really do a lot of screening; we were making most of the diagnoses when people walked in manifesting the disease. Now, in retrospect, from hepatitis studies that were underway through the 1970s, we know that as early as 1978 5 percent of gay men in San Francisco were HIV-positive. By 1980 it had reached a critical mass of 20 percent, and from that point on it exploded. It stayed steady for a long time at about 70 percent of the gay men in the city, but that generation is now dying off from AIDS.
Our safe-sex education efforts since then have been so successful that we have now wiped out over 90 percent of STDs in the gay community. It was astounding that sexual behavior could be changed to such a dramatic degree after such uncontrollable activity. If you take the gay white population alone, new cases of AIDS have dropped to almost zero in the last three or four years. Now the great concern is reaching subgroups like Hispanics, blacks, and youth. That's probably the most difficult problem we have—how to reach gay youth. They've grown up in the era of safe sex, and their guard is down. You can't get into the schools very easily to talk about sex, and now the religious folks are saying, “You can't encourage them to have sex. Tell them no.” I don't care what you tell them, that method is not working. The religious types just can't deal with giving a kid a condom. They see it as encouraging, giving them implicit permission to have sex. But if I don't give them the condom, they're still going to do it anyway. Kids view AIDS as the old man's disease, the thirty-and forty-year-old's disease. They see themselves as omnipotent, invulnerable. It's very hard to reach them.
In 1985 the first drug against HIV—AZT—came on to the market. People struggled to take the drug at virtually three times the dose we give
My practice—like many HIV/AIDS practices—has become more out-patient-oriented, probably a little easier, although still very demanding because these patients continue to be very complex and time-consuming. They're a lot more stable, so there's less change from visit to visit as compared to times past. In addition, unfortunately, we still are seeing people seroconvert, so we're still having to deal with new patients, some of whom suspect they're HIV-positive and some who don't. For people who don't suspect, the diagnosis remains as devastating as ever, requiring a great deal of support from me.
Gay physicians became medicine's experts at dealing with AIDS. We were called upon incessantly for help, guidance, and education, because we were already running annual updates and education courses for ourselves. It just got larger and larger. We were our own educators and the educators of others.
Since the beginning of the epidemic, all the diseases occurring in association with AIDS were known diseases, but they just happened to be occurring in Godawful unexpected situations and combinations. Even though some of them were unusual and difficult to treat, at least we knew what we had to deal with—pneumocystis, fungal diseases, lymphomas, and the like. AIDS really needs to be treated by a primary care physician because so many organ systems and medications are involved. The patient needs a single doctor with an overview to guide him through the incredible quagmire of care. Most care today is managed on an outpatient basis, and primary care for the person with AIDS is often a team affair that includes the patient. Doctors don't usually deal with patients who know about their diseases, let alone patients that arrive at the office
We have become compassionate experts in death and dying. Medicine has always dealt with death and dying—oncologists with cancer patients, for instance, and internists with the elderly. But what do you do with a strapping thirty-two-year-old male who's dying on you? What kind of effort do you make medically? Do you give him every single thing medicine has to offer and make him suffer terribly in the process? Fortunately, we have gotten better at dealing with death, and we now have some very good legal instruments with which to modify the allout approach that can be so punishing. We learned the art of how to care for dying patients and make them comfortable. We tell them to let us know when they have had it because we won't do anything to prolong the suffering. We let Mother Nature take her course. That has now become the standard of care, reflected in our directives.
In my practice today, I continue to work with an associate. We see about 1,200 to 1,500 people, some 85 percent of them gay, and some 90 percent of those are male and 60 percent are HIV-positive. We're on the Davies campus of California Pacific Medical Center, in the Castro area of the city. Since the gay community moved into this area over the past three decades or so, we've had to address their issues and needs, and this is now the premier private AIDS hospital in San Francisco. When AZT first came out in the early 1980s, this medical center was prescribing 10 percent of Burroughs Wellcome's entire production of the drug. There was a time when there were about twenty primary care practices that served the gay community of San Francisco, and fourteen of them right here at Davies. Gay patients are a little more spread out now because there are more physicians who will treat them, and insurance company reassignments have distributed the community a bit farther into other medical practices. The white gay community is a very successful segment of the San Francisco society, both professionally and financially, and therefore they usually have great health care benefits. The Hispanic and black gay populations are not as financially successful overall, they don't have the same benefits, and they're much harder to reach with educational programs.
In recent years it has become increasingly difficult to practice medicine
In 1979, I met a wonderful man, an architect named Jack. We lived together in a beautiful home overlooking the city. In 1984, a good friend who was living with us developed AIDS, and that's when Jack and I decided to get tested. He was positive and I was negative, an agonizing situation. Although initially I thought nothing would actually happen to him, in 1987 Jack developed AIDS and started on a very difficult, three-year downhill course ending in his death in 1990. I spent ten years without a partner, and that was very difficult. Physical beauty is highly prized in the gay community. Gyms are filled with gay men taking care of themselves and working to stay young. But because of this, a gay man in his forties and fifties goes through a lot of adjustment because he's no longer as physically desirable. Often it is difficult to socialize and to find another partner as one ages. I'm still hoping to live to be 101, and I'd love to be able to celebrate a thirty-year wedding anniversary. Happily, in August of 1999 I met a wonderfully loyal and devoted man named Mark and we're off and running on our thirty years.
My gayness was very hard for my parents in the beginning, but the last fifteen or more years have been wonderful. They don't talk about my sexual preference to their friends and family, but I think it's generally understood that I am gay. They adored Jack from the start, and that helps me to know that they are fully accepting of me. My brother has a hard time with my being gay, as does his wife, and I'm not as close to them as I would like to be. They have four wonderful, successful children that I've always felt were kind of kept distant from their funny uncle in San Francisco. I have become involved in an exciting program here in the city involving mentoring of gay youth. I think the youth are our most valuable commodity in this country, and I'll probably devote the rest of my life to making growing up gay easier than I had it.
Today you can hardly find anybody in society who hasn't been touched by AIDS. Awful and tragic as it has been, the epidemic has done a great deal to educate the community in general about sexual preference, sexuality, and goodness knows, HIV disease. There's far more acceptance of gays now than there was twenty-five years ago. For someone my age, I'm just astounded by the changes. I thought I would live to see the day that maybe it was okay to be gay and yet, now, we've got such incredible political power here in San Francisco and elsewhere. And I'm blown away by the talk about gay marriage—I just never expected it. Changes are coming so fast it's amazing. I guess that's part of getting old. Life's going so fast; it's going to be over here soon.
Barbara Ross-Lee and her wall of academic achievement.
BARBARA ROSS-LEE, D.O.
GROUND BREAKER
Athens, Ohio
Barbara Ross-Lee is well-versed in minority issues. She is the first African American woman to be appointed dean of an American medical school—an osteopathic medical school. The daughter of a union organizer and the eldest sister of singer Diana Ross, Ross-Lee grew up in Detroit in a family rich in values but short on money and amenities. She had worked her way through college, begun teaching, and started her own family when she had the opportunity to go to medical school at a new osteopathic program at Michigan State University. She took it, trained in family medicine, and ran her own private practice in Detroit for ten years before returning to academia to become a leader in medical education and dean of the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine. Ross-Lee is an athletic woman with a striking smile and elegant hair. She is a forceful presence at the podium, in the classroom, and at the policy table. “To a patient,” she tells her students, “you are not white or black or green—you're a doctor. They assume you care, regardless of your race. In fact, they expect you to care. And as long as they know you care, they'll help you understand them.”
I'VE LIVED IN OHIO FOR ten years now, and I'm dean of a state-supported osteopathic medical school. But my first recollection of Ohio was in 1952, when I was ten years old and my mother came down with tuberculosis. She went into the hospital and had part of a lung taken out. Our family of five children, the youngest at that time being only about a year old, was shipped off from Detroit, where we lived, to Alabama to stay with my mother's sister. The most vivid memory I have of the trip was that Cincinnati was the place where we had to get up out of our seats and go to the back of the bus. We were an African American family, and Cincinnati was the turning point from north to south. That's what I first knew about Ohio.
I was born at Women's Hospital in Detroit ten years earlier, the first of my parents' six children. Shortly after my birth my father joined the Army as an MP. When he came out of the service he wanted to be a policeman, but he couldn't because of the racial situation in Detroit at the time. So he went to work at a factory, Anaconda American Brass, where he stayed until he retired. He spent most of his time in the plant and became a union man in the United Auto Workers union, which later became part of the AFL-CIO. When the labor movement really gained momentum, probably the early 1950s, he became very active in the union. His union involvement was a big help to the family because being a union representative allowed him to have a job in the late fifties when everybody else got laid off. While my father never preached union ethics, his concept of working together as a team for the underdog and looking out for everybody pervaded the family. Helping and sharing were very much a part of our family upbringing. All of the issues of workplace fairness were very much a part of our growing up.
My mother was a homemaker who made all of our clothes. She had a year or two of college and had taught in community organizations before she and my father married. That was a time, though, when women usually didn't work outside of the home, but she had to work from time to time, because we were poor and frequently unable to make ends meet. My mother's family was a huge help to us, with aunts who jumped in and took care of us when we needed the help. In fact, one of my mother's sisters lived with us and was always there for us.
My mother was the one who inspired the family to believe that they could do anything they wanted to if they worked hard enough. I sometimes joke that my mother felt it was a sign of maturity to be able to delay
Being the oldest of six children, though, taught me a thing or two about parenting as well. At times I served as a surrogate parent. I remember when my brothers and sisters were teenagers, my mother would call me and say, “Let me tell you what your son did.” I'd have to remind her that they were not my children.
When my mother developed tuberculosis in 1952, we went south to live with my aunt in Bessemer, Alabama, a relatively small city then and very segregated. I was an avid reader at that time, but I was not allowed access to the public library or many other places in Bessemer. I got to see the Ku Klux Klan parading down main street, which made a big impression on me. We had to get adjusted to going to school in a segregated and hostile environment that was very different. I think as a family we all became much closer during that year. I couldn't wait to come back to a bigger world—one in which we didn't have to feel so cramped. When we got back to Detroit, though, I realized that the street we lived on was a little narrow street, and it wasn't quite the big thoroughfare that I remembered.
I remember the years after that as a happy time. We lived in the inner city in a large apartment building. There were a lot of children around, the playground was less than a block away, and our school was right across the street. It was really a community where people had lived forever. You could go blocks away, and if you did something wrong, people would tell your Mom. I didn't even know I was poor until I left that community to attend junior high school outside of our district. My mother sent me there so that I could get a better education, and it was wonderful because it got me back into reading. I worked as a library aide and challenged myself to read every single book in the library before I graduated.
At that time my family was forced to move from our home into the projects because my father got laid off. Eventually he went back to work, but we never really recovered from that. From that point on it was always a struggle. I can remember the battles over this. My mother insisted
I lived in the projects with my family until I was twenty-one. Although my father was working, he could never make enough money to move the family out because the rent was increased as his salary increased. It wasn't until my next-oldest sister, Diana, started singing and made some money that the family was able to leave the projects and move into a house that she bought.
I attended a college preparatory school, Cass Technical High School, which had a special emphasis on science, much like a magnet school. When I went there it was probably about 5 percent black and the rest white. Today it is probably 98 percent black, and its college-bound rate and scholarship rate set national records. It's a wonderful school. It just so happened that the projects were close to downtown so I could walk to Cass Tech every day, while most of the other kids took public transportation from all over the city.
At the time, the expectations for black students were not very high. But you learn to live with bias. By senior year, most of us had been lost through some sort of attrition, and we felt relatively isolated. The music instructor, for instance, would never let Diana sing because she claimed Diana didn't have “the voice.” After Diana's group, the Primettes [later the Supremes], made their first record when Diana was a senior, some of the teachers insisted that she be given an opportunity to try out for the senior production. I can remember the music teacher predicting that Diana would never be successful singing—Diana Ross! The Primettes were the sister group to the Primes, who later became the Temptations. I didn't see her perform for years because they were on the road, but when they came to Detroit to perform I remember telling her, “I can't believe it, you really are professionals.” They had changed from little girls that used to sing at the drop of a hat into a really poised group.
I had begun thinking about medicine then and expecting to go to college, not fully realizing the money needed to do that. I was admitted to three colleges after graduation, but couldn't attend my first choice—Michigan State—because my father couldn't afford it. Likewise, the scholarship to Albion didn't pay for room and board, so I went to Wayne State University, commuting on a daily basis. I really liked Wayne. It probably
Meanwhile, I fell in love and got married, really ending my medical school dreams, I thought. I graduated in 1965 with a bachelor's degree in chemistry and biology, only to realize that it was not a very useful degree. Parke-Davis offered me a job weighing rats. That's what my bachelor's degree in science was going to get me. Instead I took a job working at an osteopathic hospital in a Detroit suburb, the Martin Place Hospital in Madison Heights, Michigan. That was my first contact with osteopathic medicine.
Laboratory services were just starting to become more mechanized then, with autoanalyzers and coltercounters. They needed somebody with a science background to troubleshoot the new machinery. It was wonderful because it was a small hospital and I got to learn to use everything in the lab, but once I had mastered everything, I became a little bit frustrated with what appeared to be a dead end. Then in 1965 I got an opportunity to join the National Teacher Corps. It was an ideal choice because my first husband was also a teacher—and I took it. The Teacher Corps was a domestic version of the Peace Corps. The program was structured so that with a college degree and some practical experience teaching in poor and minority communities, you could earn a master's degree in education. We were placed in a teaching environment and took graduate courses in the evening at the College of Education at Wayne State. I was placed at the very school that was next door to the projects I had lived in. These kids were the difficult students—discipline problems assigned to us by the other teachers. There were five of us on the teaching team with a team leader, in a class with fifty students.
If you went into these kids' homes, you would never look at them the same way again. As much as my class may not have taken advantage of what a school could offer, at least the school was safe. This was just after the riots of 1967. It was an interesting time. I had one child, Stephen; Monica wasn't born until January 1969. I lived on the northwest side of Detroit, which was the safest area, but my family—in the home Diana had purchased—was right in the riot area. The National Guard was all over the community. All the stores were burned down and nobody could get food, so we were trying to bring food in to my family from the
After the riots, the Detroit News did a survey of the entire Detroit community, and they hired black college students to do the work. I took the job on a parttime basis while I was teaching. My job was to visit all of the houses in a section of the East Side of Detroit and complete a questionnaire about what the people there did during the riots. I went into homes that if a child of mine visited today, I'd probably have a heart attack. I don't think my mother knew what I was doing. I'd go and sit in homes trying to get answers to a long questionnaire. People in the black community were very supportive of us, so it wasn't as dangerous as it might have been. Many times I heard, “Leave that girl alone, she's a school girl.” Education was revered.
I grew up in a family that didn't really have a doctor. We used emergency rooms when we had to, so that my interest in medicine wasn't based on any role models. Rather it came from seeing a need that was just not being met. It was the Civil Rights Movement that really opened up medical school for me. A friend in the National Teacher Corps told me in the spring of 1970 that Michigan State was opening an osteopathic school in Pontiac and suggested that I apply. I was teaching school at the time and raising two babies. It was the year after I finished the National Teacher Corps, and my first marriage had failed. I was trying to decide what was I going to do with the rest of my life. The school was taking students for their second class and, despite the fact that I didn't have enough hours in physics, I made the decision, took a summer physics course, and was admitted.
In Detroit the Civil Rights Movement was quite visible, and political empowerment was a direct result. But economic empowerment was lost after the 1967 riots. After Martin Luther King's death, when the new osteopathic medical school was opening, there was a clear commitment to affirmative action; the classes would be diverse. That was impressive in light of the fact that the classes were so small in the first couple of years. A lot of that can be attributed to Mike Megan, the dean of the new school. He was committed to diversity. In the first class there were two blacks and one woman in a class of seventeen. And in the next class, my class, there were two women and two blacks in a class of twenty-one. That was significant at the time.
This was a three-year program in which we got very little time off.
When I finished my degree, I did a rotating internship back at Martin Place Hospital in Detroit. I thought about doing a residency in pediatrics but decided that since I was an “old lady” of thirty-two, divorced with two children, I shouldn't wait any longer to get started. The osteopathic tradition was to begin a general practice following a rotating internship. First I signed on with an older doctor in Detroit who, it turned out, passed out a lot of codeine, amphetamines, and Valium. I left him after three months and went to work on the East Side for a physicians' group that ran clinics all around the Detroit area that turned out to be Medicaid mills. They could see 250 patients in a seven-hour day without one scheduled appointment. They were doing more triage than actual treatment, and I didn't want to practice that way. After six months I left them, and on July 1, 1974, I opened my own practice in a freestanding, modified dental office on the west side of Detroit. It was hard to compete with the group practice I had left, though. I resented them for the first three years of my practice because I couldn't figure out why patients went to them in droves when I was dispensing good care while struggling to build a practice.
The name of my practice was Community Family Practice, which I think came before its time. It was a solo practice for the nearly ten years I worked in Detroit, both family- and community-focused. I moved into a part of the city that was undergoing dynamic change, a lot of white flight. Physicians were moving out as well, so it was possible to build a really good practice with lots of young families new to the community. It was great. I treated all kinds of medical problems. My approach was to diagnose the problem and then refer the patient to the appropriate
My decision to enter academia was actually reactionary. By 1982 I'd been in a solo practice for eight years, and I really wanted more stimulation. I found myself becoming excited about finding some terrible disease process and disappointed if it wasn't present. I was also unhappy with the changes taking place in health care delivery. I spent more time trying to get paid than I spent seeing patients. I'd reached a point where I was talking to third-party computers more than real people. That's when I started looking around for other things to do.
At about the same time, I got a call from my alma mater, Michigan State College of Osteopathic Medicine, asking if I would be interested in being considered for the position of chair of the Department of Family Medicine. I asked if I would be considered as a serious candidate or did they just need some affirmative action representation. I was told that I would, indeed, be a competitive candidate, so I went ahead and submitted my application. Ultimately, I was offered the job, although it was not an easy process. Early in the interview process, the dean himself, my old mentor, Mike Megan, told me that I was not qualified to be a chair because I didn't have research and academic experience and that I was wasting my time. At that point I had nothing to lose, and so I completed the interviews. Others thought differently of my credentials, and subsequently the university provost said they couldn't give the position to anybody else until I turned it down. So I started my academic career working for a dean who really did not want me to have the position. One of the things I liked least about my time at Michigan State was the politics of the profession. It truly was an “old boys'” club. It's changing now, but it's not all the way there yet.
While I was learning some lessons about faculty politics, we did wonderful things in the Department of Family Medicine. I thoroughly enjoyed including students more effectively in the department, designing a new curriculum, and bringing a more scholarly focus to the department. A special problem for osteopathic medicine was that, even at Michigan State, osteopathy was seen in the shadow of allopathic medicine, a minority profession with a minority mentality. This perspective limited the vision of the participants and made them very defensive. People in osteopathic academic medicine have found it harder to change because they've secured a space and are afraid to step out of it for fear it will be
But Michigan State also had exceptional circumstances. It was the first public osteopathic school and, despite our differences, Mike Megan was dynamic, harddriving, and a very bright dean. He took the school where he wanted it to go and brought the rest of the profession along with him. Deans at private schools, because they report to very political boards, do not have the flexibility that Mike Megan had. The whole profession was willing to allow the school a lot more latitude in developing because it was the first public school. Many of those trained at Michigan State moved into leadership positions at many other osteopathic medical schools.
Health policy—the issues, forces, and players that shape the health system—was another area that became increasingly important to me in my role as a department chair. I had been involved in policy at the state level, particularly with state public health reports on children, perinatal centers, perinatal regionalization, and minority health issues. When I left practice, I thought that in academia I would have an impact on minority health or the health of youngsters. Although I learned that a policy role is not a given for an academic, I worked with the public health department at the state level, eventually teaching policy formulation. In 1990, I learned about the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellowships, a year-long Washington-based fellowship program designed to give academics a firsthand policy experience. Ultimately I was selected and, truly, it was an experience that changed my life.
The fellowship expanded my vision of what's possible. After an orientation phase during which the six of us visited all over Washington learning about national health policy, we selected a member of Congress for whom we would work as a health staffer for the rest of the year. I chose Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey. Over the year I learned how to position a member of Congress around an issue, how to evaluate a situation based on who is on your side and who is not, and understanding why they're not on your side.
Bill Bradley offered me the opportunity to play politics with the big boys and to champion the kinds of issues I was interested in. I worked on a lot of Medicaid reform, the Family Medical Leave Act, veterans' issues, and children's health programs such as immunization. The senator was not very informed about AIDS, which was a rapidly emerging policy issue in 1990. So it became part of my job to orient him on AIDS so
Coming back to academia was a little deflating because it was difficult to explain my fellowship experience and what it was like. Nobody quite understood what it was all about except that I had worked in a senator's office. To capitalize on the experience, I negotiated with the new dean at Michigan State to become the associate dean for health policy. I wanted to work on issues on which I thought the profession needed to take some positions. When I was in Washington, most people on the Senate health staffs had never heard of or had understanding of osteopathic medicine. The profession ran into crises like being left out of the Medicaid regulations, or having bills drafted that openly said a doctor had to be board-certified by the American Board of Medical Specialties. And so we structured the associate dean position to allow me to continue to work on the national and state levels and with groups such as the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine and American Osteopathic Association.
The fellowship also opened another door for me, although it was not apparent at the time. Based on my work in Washington, I received an invitation from a group of students to speak at Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Athens, Ohio—a relatively new (1975) and growing public school that was part of Ohio's higher education system. I went and spoke in early 1992. I had no intention of leaving Michigan State and no aspirations to become a dean, but when the deanship in Athens became available in summer of 1992, the students at OU begged me to apply. The students actually recruited me for the position and even started looking for jobs for my husband. It was very flattering, and they were really an interesting class.
I did talk to a former dean of the school, Gerald Faverman, about the position. He told me there was no way that Ohio University, in the middle of Appalachia in southeast Ohio, would be able to accept a black female dean. My reaction to that was, “Well, maybe that's true, but I'm not taking your word for it. I'm going to have to go down there, I'm going to have to see it, and I'm going to have to be uncomfortable.” I enjoyed the interview process. Faculty and staff wanted “change.” Clearly
One of my first jobs was to position the college for whatever was going to happen in the changing health care environment, which meant that we had to build a stronger practice base for training locally. Ohio University is located in a grossly underserved area. One of our residents just went to join a doctor in the next county who was the sole physician for the entire county. For that reason, my strategy when I began was to build up a clinical base right in our area. If every hospital in the state closed, I would still have an obligation to train a hundred students per year. The school has the luxury of being in an area that can expand, whereas many of the other medical schools around the state have to downsize. At the two community hospitals in Athens, we have nearly doubled the number of physicians since I arrived in 1993. And at our clinics we are building a stronger ambulatory base. We have a clinic on campus and satellite clinics in all the surrounding counties. We also have contractual relationships with the Chillicothe County Veterans' Administration for inpatient/outpatient services. We still need more ambulatory training sites as we change our curriculum.
We have seen some successes. We have doubled our patient load and our patient visits so we can provide early clinical contact on site, without having to farm out our medical students. In this way we avoid having a large number of adjunct faculties, and we are instead able to provide that ambulatory training to our students here. Meanwhile, we restructured our clinical training base and developed what we call a CORE system, which stands for Centers of Osteopathic Research and Education. It is a statewide integrated system for pre- and postdoctoral students. There have been frustration and morale problems among the faculty due to the changes, but they were ultimately completely successful.
One of the objectives I have had as dean is to build an academic cadre of osteopathic physicians. This is a concern I have with new osteopathic medical schools opening up with insufficient faculty with academic background. They're going to need deans and department chairs and faculty for these institutions. It's not that it can't be done, but I think the profession hasn't done a good job of creating a pipeline for academicians and academic administrators. I wasn't prepared; I was lucky.
Another area in which the college has made a contribution to osteopathic medicine is in the training of minority students. We estimate that 15 percent of our students are from underrepresented minority groups
As I look toward the future, I see the similarities between osteopathic and allopathic medicine as far greater than the differences. Osteopathic and allopathic medical education are almost identical, the practices of the two professions have been merging all along anyway, and as osteopathic and allopathic hospitals come together—as they are—the barriers against joint and combined training will erode. When this occurs, the distinctiveness of the two professions may disappear. I think that ultimately we're not going to need two professions.
I do think that what osteopathic medicine has done from its minority position for health care and primary care in America has been unbelievable. I'm not sure that history is appreciated by the allopathic world because they are still coming from a specialty perspective. They don't yet see the value of primary care or the fact that you can do a wonderful job in a different kind of environment and come out with an excellent outcome.
Just as family support made medical school and graduation possible for me, my professional and academic successes are the direct result of family support. I married my second husband, Edmond Beverly, in 1976 during my time at Michigan State and created a blended family of children. We have what I call a “Brady Bunch” family—his, mine, and ours. I have two children from my first marriage, I raised two children from my husband's first marriage, and then we had one child together. Interestingly, our older two children are both male and named Stephen, although they have completely different personalities. When I assumed the deanship in Ohio, our youngest child was a senior in high school. I had to leave her in Okemos, Michigan. Today the geographic separation from family continues as the kids leave the nest and my husband's career as superintendent of K–12 school districts keeps him professionally in Michigan. The older of the two Stephens is an engineer with an M.B.A., and he's in San Francisco now. The second oldest Stephen is in education; he's teaching in a boys' school in Muskegon, Michigan. Monica, the third oldest, just completed her allopathic training in obgyn and is employed by Ford Hospital in Detroit. Our youngest son, Kevin, is a policeman
When I speak to students or residents about medicine and some of my personal concerns about the underserved, I often tell some of my personal history. Although I don't perceive it as a bad health history, it is not a simple one. I lost my very first child to rubella during the rubella epidemic of 1964–65, even though I never knew I had it. The child was born with transposition of the great vessels. During my later pregnancies I suffered from an incompetent cervix. My youngest daughter, Alaina, was born prematurely at twenty-three weeks and barely made it, and I lost two more pregnancies after that. I learned a lot of lessons along the way about how people are treated in hospitals—how assumptions are made based on what you look like versus what you come in with, and how doctors don't listen. It doesn't matter who you are, doctors don't listen; it's a power position. When I lost the baby with the transposition, I was not in medicine, and they misled me to think that this was a minor problem. They didn't realize how much I needed to know the truth to prepare for the baby's death three days later.
Being African American has given me insight into the debate regarding the advantages of having minority physicians working in minority communities. What I have to offer is not just who I am, but what I do. I could and should be able to practice medicine anywhere. I knew from a service perspective that my skills could benefit many people, yet I chose to work in an underserved community because they needed me. I felt compelled to work with people who had been ignored and poorly served by the medical system. This was my choice. In truth, though, as a minority physician, I didn't have people knocking down my door to come practice in Beverly Hills. In many ways there is an expectation that a minority physician will practice in a minority community, and that limits opportunities for minority physicians.
Patients in need don't care what color you are. You're not white, black, or green—you're a doctor. They expect you to care about them and care for them. The problem is that minority communities want and expect quality care from doctors, and they frequently don't get it. If we depend only upon black physicians to treat black patients, for instance, there simply aren't enough to go around. We'll end up with an awful lot of premature and preventable deaths of black patients. To me this is “Jim Crow with a twist,” and I resent it.
The real issue is providing better service to minority communities with
Janelle Goetcheus worries about her patient's feet.
JANELLE GOETCHEUS, M.D.
DOCTOR SUCCOR
Washington, D.C.
Blankets, vitamins, condoms, and mittens: these are items that Janelle Goetcheus dispenses while visiting homeless patients. One part Saint Joan and two parts Mother Teresa, Goetcheus has been an omnipresent force in the care of the indigent, the impoverished, and the homeless in Washington, D.C., since the mid-1970s. During this time she has treated thousands of the city's most down-and-out patients and founded or helped in the founding of an extraordinary series of service programs—Columbia Road Health Service, Christ House, Mary's Center, and Joseph's House, to name a few. Religion and spiritual commitment have always been important to her. She and her Methodist minister husband intended a life of missionary work abroad when a chance trip brought them to the nation's capital in 1975, and they discovered and took on a lifetime of challenges. Since 1995, she has served as the medical director of Unity Health Care, an amalgam of Washington's Healthcare for the Homeless program and the city's two community health centers. She and her husband have raised their family living in Christ House, sharing their home and their meals with patients and colleagues alike.
Goetcheus is soft-spoken and straightforward, with a perpetual aura of kindness. She speaks with great satisfaction about her calling, which she defines in terms of service and healing. But she is not altogether content with her quarter-century of giving succor to the vulnerable. “I still feel a sadness from seeing so much unnecessary suffering. There are younger people out on the street today, many of them crack-addicted, lining up for the soup kitchen, and clearly feeling hopeless. This country needs to make a much more fundamental commitment to care for all of its people.”
I'VE WORKED AND LIVED IN the inner city of Washington, D.C., for almost a quarter of a century, but Indiana and my faith in God are my real roots. That's where my life and where my vocation began.
My father grew up in Indiana and Illinois, where my grandfather, who was a United Methodist minister, had several parishes. My mother grew up in North Manchester, Indiana, where she was a member of the Church of the Brethren. The Brethren are one of the Anabaptist groups of German origin related to the Mennonites and the Quakers. Marrying outside the church was a difficult decision for my mother, even though she was marrying a minister's son. I was born in Indianapolis in 1940 but grew up in Muncie, Indiana, where my father worked as an auditor for the state of Indiana. My mother taught school all of her life, first in public schools, then in a parochial school, and finally as a tutor for homeless adults who were learning to read.
My parents belonged to the High Street United Methodist Church, a large downtown church in Muncie. Going to Sunday service and Sunday school each week was very much a part of my childhood. Prayer was always important to me, even as a child. It was during time spent in prayer that I think I began to think about where I was headed in life. Within the church, it was assumed that some people would go into fulltime Christian service, as we called it. In our Protestant tradition, that usually meant that men would become ministers and women would become missionaries. I never really wrestled with whether or not to go to the seminary because very few women became ministers at that time. My primary goal was to live with and help the underserved.
I also decided at an early age that I wanted to be a physician, but that specific vocational goal was less important. First I knew who I wanted to serve—the poor. The question of how best to manifest that service was secondary. I was a shy person on the surface and not the type people
I finished high school in 1958 and went to Ball State Teachers' College, now University, in Muncie on a three-year premed program. I lived at home and continued to worship at our family church. A number of overseas missionaries came to speak at the church, and I expected that, eventually, my work as a doctor would take me overseas because I assumed that was where the greatest need was; I simply didn't think in terms of major medical problems here in this country.
I went to Indiana University Medical School from 1961 to 1965. Eleven women started out in my class of two hundred, but only eight of us graduated. Other women I've spoken with from my class seem to have more memories than I do of feeling intimidated and squelched at various points in medical school. I was very focused on why I was there, so I just didn't pay much attention to sexism. Of course there were off-color jokes and things like that, but I was a quiet person and just didn't let it bother me. One unpleasant experience that probably wouldn't happen now was being selected as a research subject in a physiology class. The teacher wanted women subjects for an experiment on basal metabolic rates. Another woman and I drew straws; she got the hot room and I got the cold room. I had to put on a bathing suit and sit in there, monitoring my temperature with a rectal thermometer. My lab partners were watching, and the whole thing was very cold and very degrading.
The faculty physicians were supportive in general, but I didn't receive much encouragement from them about my interest in general practice. Most people went into specialties at that time, and the local family doctor was always considered the low person on the totem pole in terms of intellect. When I was a senior, I had my first real experience with family practice because I was one of two people in our class allowed to spend a semester working with a family physician. That internship really opened my eyes to a different way of looking at medicine. I lived with the family physician and his wife in a small town in northern Indiana. The doctor was in private practice and made house calls. Everything he did, I did; it was really wonderful.
In my third year of medical school, I went to work in the Congo for
In an amazing twenty-four hours in June of 1965, my husband to be, Allen, was ordained a United Methodist minister in the afternoon, we were married in the evening, and I graduated from medical school the next morning. Allen and I had actually grown up together in Muncie, but we didn't really date until my junior year of medical school, when he was in his first year at the Garrett Theological Seminary in Chicago, part of Northwestern University.
After we were married, I moved to Chicago to be with him, and I did a one-year rotating internship at Evanston Hospital, affiliated with Northwestern. It was a wealthy hospital, and so there was a lot of observing rather than hands-on experience. We spent the next several years moving back and forth between Chicago and Indiana as my husband continued his postgraduate training and I did various short-time medical jobs to help pay the bills. My first son was born in Indianapolis in 1967. In 1969 we moved to Upland, Indiana, where we stayed until 1976. My husband was head of the speech and drama department at a small Christian college and worked with a religious drama group. I practiced medicine in nearby Marion, Indiana, where I worked at the Marion Hospital as the first dedicated emergency room doctor. Some physicians were afraid they were going to lose their patients to me, but, as I continued my work there, acceptance grew, and finally we had a group of five ER physicians. The hospital, the only one in the county, was very busy and turned out to be a great educational experience for me. It's really where I got my residency training. When I needed a cardiologist, a cardiologist came in; when I needed an OB consult, an obstetrician came by, and so on.
After that, I worked for a year with a group of family physicians. We had two more children by then, and I wanted to work set hours so I could be home when the children were little. The experiences in Marion led
While we were living in Marion, we were looking for ways to go overseas, but nothing seemed to work out. One of the last ideas we explored, in about 1974, was heading to Pakistan, where my husband was going to teach and I would work in a hospital. We waited months for a visa, but there were so many obstacles being American Christians applying to go to a Muslim country. In the process of waiting for that visa, we came out here to Washington, D.C., for a visit that proved life-changing.
Before the trip to Washington, my awareness of racial inequities and health care needs in this country was very limited. When we lived in Chicago in the mid-sixties, I had had a bird'seye view of the riots when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. I remember seeing the fires and the deserted subways in downtown Chicago. But even after that experience I had little direct understanding of suffering and racism in America. In Marion, the African American community lived primarily in just one section of town; I don't remember thinking this was unjust or wondering where these people got health care. In fact, I later learned that Marion had been the northernmost city where a black was hung, back in the 1930s. But my own awareness of this oppressive history just wasn't there; I was very focused on the needs of people overseas and not in this country.
We came to Washington for a weekend to visit a small ecumenical community called Church of the Savior. Members of this community had begun a series of ministries in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. When we arrived, the church had just acquired its first apartment building, called the Ritz. Jim Rouse, a well-known local developer, had an interest in lowincome housing and had helped the Church of the Savior buy the apartment building. Before renovation the Ritz was a terrible, run-down, innercity building, with a leaky roof and garbage all through the basement. It had a terrible smell, and people jammed into every apartment. We were introduced to the tenants in the building, and somehow it came out that I was a physician. Several of the people began telling me how hard it was for them to get health care here; it was an eye-opening experience for me.
After that weekend, we were never quite the same. Although we went back to Upland and kept waiting for the Pakistan visas, we also began to explore the idea of moving to Washington instead. There was no particular health service going on in D.C., and there were already many
We moved in August 1976 to suburban Columbia, Maryland, where the family would be comfortable but we were close enough to work in innercity Washington. I took a job as a parttime physician in the emergency room in Howard County Hospital. In Columbia, there was a religious community patterned after Church of the Savior. The Church of the Savior talks about a person's inward journey and outward journey. These journeys involve spending an hour each day alone in prayer and participating in a small mission group in which everyone works toward a common goal. I joined a mission group that focused on health issues, and we soon began working with the Church of the Savior in D.C., opening a parttime health service in the Ritz apartment building. We put up dividers and exam tables in a small community room and went to work.
In 1978 I was asked to help begin a health service in another lowincome apartment building that had been purchased by Community of Hope—an organization which provided housing and social services for the neighbors around Belmont Street. The building, unbelievably, was in worse condition than the Ritz. As my practice began to grow with patients from both the Ritz and the Community of Hope, I needed to be on a hospital staff so I could admit and refer patients for specialty care. I checked with Georgetown University Hospital, but they didn't have general practitioners on staff at that time, and they certainly didn't want my uninsured patients. They referred me to Providence Hospital, a community hospital in northeast D.C. with a mission of serving people from the inner city, regardless of insurance status, and I met Sister Irene, a saint of a hospital administrator who made things work at Providence. She welcomed me on to their staff, initiating a wonderful relationship with Providence Hospital that has endured to the present. This, however, didn't solve my problems with diagnostic testing and specialty referrals, so I next appealed to the public hospital, D.C. General. But in 1977 they would make no special arrangements for us, so we had no choice but to send our patients who needed diagnostic tests to the emergency room
In those days, I got into trouble with D.C. General because I preached a “sermon” about these issues during a worship service at a nearby coffeehouse, one of the outreaches of Church of the Savior. I shared my experiences trying to get patients through that D.C. General system, and someone sent a copy to Bob Johnson, the chief administrator at D.C. General at the time. He was madder than a snort at me and sent me a nasty letter. But as the years went on, he became a friend and worked to help community clinics with their referral needs. We tried through interfaith groups and through the D.C. medical society to get a group of specialist physicians to see our patients in their offices, but we never could really get it going. Eventually, with the help of the Catholic archdiocese, we were able to address this problem. Dr. Ed Pelligrino, a Georgetown physician and noted ethicist who was on our Columbia Road board, went to the archbishop of Washington, Archbishop [now Cardinal] Hickey and explained the trouble we were having. Cardinal Hickey wrote all the Catholic physicians in the Washington metropolitan area and invited them to a beautiful dinner at his residence. During dinner, he got up and spoke in terms of the need and connecting it with one's faith journey. Out of that came a small group of physicians who helped set up the Volunteer Health Care Network, which now—twelve years later—consists of about 350 specialists who volunteer their time to see uninsured patients from innercity clinics. As helpful as it is, the network is swamped with requests. There are simply never enough of certain kinds of specialists.
In 1979, our family moved from our home in Columbia to the Adams Morgan neighborhood where I was working. The decision to move to the city was a major one. We worried about safety issues for the children. What's more, the children thought Columbia was heaven; it had every recreational thing a child could ever want. There have been times since then when we have asked ourselves, “What have we done?” There have been times when the children were frightened, or had things stolen, or were mugged. But if you talked to them now, I think 90 percent of what you would hear would be very positive, a real appreciation of the gift it was for them to live here. Their lives in Maryland had been so separate from the daily suffering we see here. It didn't work for us to just bring the kids by once or twice a week. My patients and the people I
The year 1979 was eventful in another way too. With support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, our small health service expanded and became the Columbia Road Health Service, and we moved from our original room at the Ritz into a two-bedroom apartment down the street. Our patient population grew rapidly. I worked as the physician and Allen as the pastoral counselor. In addition to the Ritz, eight other low-income apartment buildings in the area were purchased by the Church of the Savior group called Jubilee Housing for the purpose of renovation and community building. Our population also changed dramatically. There was a huge influx of poor Latinos into Washington in the early 1980s because of the war in El Salvador, so we had to make sure that our staff could speak Spanish. Later a large number of people from Vietnam also moved into the nearby Mount Pleasant area.
By 1989, the Columbia Road Health Service had outgrown the two-bedroom apartment and moved to a new space on Columbia Road in the heart of Adams Morgan that we still occupy. We continue to this day providing services to any poor neighborhood resident with no other resources.
In 1982 two other physicians joined us at Columbia Road Health Service, Don Martin and David Hilficker. David began going with me to Community of Hope, and Don joined me in going to So Others May Eat [SOME]. SOME was feeding over a thousand homeless each day, and Father John Adams invited us to help with the health service.
But it was frustrating because, after seeing these homeless, sick patients, we had to turn them right back into the street. In 1984, Washington, D.C., applied for and received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts. Thus Washington's Health Care for the Homeless project was begun and allowed us to begin placing health services directly into the homeless shelters. The first shelter we went into was Pierce Shelter in an old school building. We did exams in the coatroom. Eventually we built another little room onto it, and that was our first onsite health service under the Health Care for the Homeless grant. At that time the shelters were quite an experience. There were rats, and sometimes no running water. We carried in water to wash our hands. The medical teams would see patients at the shelters but bring their charts to our backroom administrative office at Columbia Road.
Since that time, our activities have expanded, as have the needs. The federal government began support of health care for the homeless with the McKinney Act of 1987 and has provided us funding since that time. The numbers of homeless people increased through the 1980s as the cheap, longterm boarding houses disappeared and more and more people were left out on the street. Drugs were coming in and adding to the problem. Fortunately there were people in Washington like the homeless activist and advocate Mitch Snyder, who wouldn't let anybody forget what was happening here.
The next step was to fulfill the clear need for a place where homeless people we cared for could come to recover from their illnesses. This led to the creation of Christ House, a twenty-four-hour medical facility for homeless men and women with debilitating illnesses. Christ House, a thirty-four-bed, four-story building on Columbia Road, bought and renovated through the generosity of one woman, opened on December 24, 1985. Christ House has been a learning experience for me and part of my faith journey. We thought we knew pretty well who would be coming, but the people were much sicker than we anticipated. I think that situation has worsened as the years have gone by because people are kept in hospitals a much shorter period of time and then put back out on the street. Christ House was not meant to be a permanent residence. The men and women typically stayed a few weeks to a year, and then we tried to help them find apartments. We found, however, that we needed to provide longer-term care to certain of the chronically ill who had multiple health problems like strokes. In January 1996, we opened a permanent housing facility nearby with thirty-seven apartments for chronically ill homeless people. It's called Kairos, which means a special time in someone's life, a time of change.
Christ House was very much a place where we as physicians and staff also wanted to live, since we wanted to be with the people we served. All of the physicians already lived in the neighborhood. David lived just a few blocks away, Don lived down the alley, and our family lived a block away. The decision to move our family to the neighborhood in 1979 had been a major transition in our lives, but when we made the decision to move into Christ House about seven years later, it was a relatively easy transition for everybody. Here, again, we wanted to be closer to the people we were working with.
There are many gathering times at Christ House. The residential community gathers for a meal and sharing each Monday evening. Every Thursday evening everyone joins together for a candlelit dinner where
One project seemed to lead to another. In addition to the growing numbers of homeless, we also began to see many more patients with HIV. In 1990, three of the men with HIV moved into guest rooms at Christ House and later, with David Hilficker and his family, moved into a house close by to begin Joseph's House, a home for terminally ill persons with HIV. Services for prenatal care were almost nonexistent in this part of town. In 1983 the city approached Columbia Road Health Service with an offer of $50,000 to start a prenatal program. We hired two nurse midwives who were given staff privileges at Providence Hospital and allowed to admit uninsured patients; but the need continued to grow. A few years later we were offered funding by the city to combine our prenatal program at Columbia Road Health Service with a city-funded program. A place for a health service was located a few blocks away on Columbia Road, became a separate nonprofit, and was named Mary's Center. Maria Gomez became the administrator. Today Mary's Center is a beautifully renovated factory building a few blocks away, serving a largely Latino population of mothers, children, and teenagers.
The work of the Healthcare for the Homeless organization grew through the late 1980s and the 1990s. We set up a permanent clinic at the gigantic, 800-bed shelter originally founded by Mitch Snyder and the Community for Creative Non-Violence [CCNV]. We also worked in horrendous emergency family shelters like the Capital City Inn and the Pitts Hotel, in multiple small neighborhood shelters, and at a public housing complex devoid of health services.
During this same period, the city's two large, federally supported community health centers were dying. Their finances were in shambles, and they weren't making payroll. In 1995, in an effort to keep them open, the federal government asked us—Health Care for the Homeless—to take over these two huge centers. This was a tough decision for the Health Care for the Homeless board, for Vince Keane, our executive director,
It was hard initially bringing the two staffs together. The homeless staff felt that they were going to be swallowed up in the new organization, and the health center staff wondered who all these new folks were and whether they really knew anything about community health. But as people began to work together they grew together. In 1997, we changed the name of the whole operation to Unity Health Care, reflecting our larger mission. In 1998, we set up a managed care company called Health Right and competed successfully for a Medicaid managed care contract. Only a little over 10 percent of our patients have Medicaid. So keeping them with us is important to staying open.
These days I spend at least two-thirds of my time doing administrative work and only a day or two a week seeing patients. Administration is not one of my gifts, but it is what needs to be done. We have about twenty-five physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants working for Unity and a total staff of 160. They are wonderful people. They speak half a dozen languages. They come from innercity D.C., all over the world, and everywhere in between. They do a wonderful job of caring for people despite many obstacles.
I think it's part of a physician's duty to think about the community's health, and part of that involves advocacy work. But invariably that work puts you in conflict with people you have to work with. That's always been a struggle for me. I know I need to work with D.C. General, so how much do I go after them in terms of quality-of-care issues? How much do you go after a TB clinic that at times has no X rays or no developing fluid? A man in the elderly unit at the CCNV shelter, for instance, had abnormal chest X rays. We told the city TB officials, and they dismissed it as “just a little TB.” Then we got a sputum positive test result for TB on him, but they still insisted that we keep him in the shelter.
We have always relied on city funding and city programs. We need to be able to work with the health department people and the city politicians. They are our allies in much of what we do. But the city programs have real problems—problems that we know better than anyone. When
The last straw was the mishandling of a patient in the city prison who was told he had simple pneumonia when he actually had multiple drug resistant [MDR] TB. He was released, became homeless, and was eventually admitted to a local hospital. Then he checked out, used drugs, and was readmitted. Eventually the hospital called the city's public health department. I was working at the CCNV shelter when the health department called wanting to bring the man to the shelter infirmary. I knew he was a sputum-positive, MDR TB patient and I said no, since we could not isolate him and he would be a lethal threat to everyone in the shelter. I was told that there was no other place to put him. We went to the press—and got good coverage on the story. We didn't get the patient, but Christ House, which had received city grants, permanently lost all of its funding—40 percent of the budget. So advocacy work is tricky.
As I think back over the more than twenty years I've worked in this community, there is happiness on several levels. Being part of a supportive community of people has been wonderful and, on a daily basis, just being with people at Christ House has been enriching and brought me lots of joy. A group of us at Christ House has met together regularly year in and year out to talk and to pray. That's my community in terms of discerning new things. I'm never alone in discerning things. It's sitting down with others, seeing that there are other people who have the same dream, who believe that this is something that we are being asked to do. I pray every day on my own, but reflection with others is very important to me, too.
When we first thought about Joseph's House, for example, we realized we would have to go out and borrow money, something we had never done. We were skeptical. I remember Don Martin, one of the physicians who lives at Christ House, reading to us from the Old Testament about looking at things in new ways. We sat there all together, and he told us to go out and find the money. So that's what we did. We had a terrible time borrowing money to open an HIV home. A prominent bank here in the city just outright told us that they did not lend to “the AIDS industry.” But we eventually got a loan, and Joseph's House is open and doing wonderful work ten years later.
Christ House has been good for my family as well. My husband oversees the management of both Columbia Road Health Service and Christ
I feel a sadness in the sense of seeing so much unnecessary suffering. There has definitely been deterioration in terms of health care access. I think it's worse now than at any time I can remember. There are younger people out on the street, many of them crack-addicted, lining up at the soup trucks and kitchens, and clearly feeling hopeless. There are also more people with HIV and substance abuse problems. Even the hospitals, which have often been very generous in the past, are being forced to cut back. We know what it means for someone not to get health care. We know the ravages of sickness on the human body. We know all of that. We've got all the studies we need. Everything is so much worse when you don't have health care—people will end up in ICU who don't need to, babies will be born deformed, people will die. We know all of this, and yet we don't really do anything about it. Morally, we're on a downward path and we will not survive unless something changes.
But I continue to dream. I know that many things that I haven't thought possible in the past have happened. That makes me hopeful for the future.
7. Building a Better Future
The Case for Primary Care
The stories of the men and women of Big Doctoring paint a portrait of primary care as it has been practiced in the latter part of the twentieth century. They are a committed group, partisans of generalism, practitioners of a revitalized, redefined field of medicine. Their work and their lives throw down the gauntlet for the twenty-first century.
Where is primary care headed? Where, indeed, is the health system—which represents one-seventh of the nation's economy—headed? Fifty years from now, would the speakers in this book look back with a sense of satisfaction that their legacy had been valued and built firmly into the country's systems of care and healing, or would they find their tracks erased by an onslaught of technology, specialism, and individualism?
There is, of course, an infinite variety of possibilities as to what shape the future may take. Forces that are not entirely predictable, such as the economy and the advance of science, will have important influences, as will totally imponderable factors, such as war or global calamity. But ten years or fifty years from now, both specialism and generalism are certain to be present in health care because both philosophies are inherent in the ways humans solve problems and manage business. The uncertainty is in what proportion these tendencies will be represented. Will health care be an aggregation of multiple, segmented, specialty services, or will it be a system built around a human healer, a giver and integrator of care? The answer to this question will tell a good deal about the nature of health and well-being in our society.
We have the opportunity to influence the course of events through the principles we enunciate and the investments we make today in areas such as education and public institutions. The rationale for building the base of primary care in this country is compelling. While many Americans like their doctors and are proud of the scientific prowess of the medical system, there is concurrent dissatisfaction with the system as a whole and a realization that its considerable cost does not match up with its more modest outcomes. Many realize that our system is exceedingly expensive, lavish in its use of technology, and undistinguished in its results. The quality of medical care, as measured by everything from consumer satisfaction to iatrogenic deaths, is not high. Fifteen percent of our population does not even have health insurance. By most measures, we have an enormously topheavy, procedure-prone system dominated by a specialty model of care with relatively little investment in primary care. This system consumes an everexpanding portion of our gross domestic product, increasingly competing with every other economic interest, personal and public. The health care reform movement of the early 1990s took on this set of problems but failed. The offensive of the late 1990s, touted as a “market solution” to this same conundrum, has not worked either, affronting patients and physicians alike and controlling costs only briefly. And innovation—new pharmaceuticals, diagnostic devices, and treatments—seems only to complicate the decisions that are necessary to craft a system that uses our science effectively, satisfies patients, and is fair.
Primary care built on the broad base of generalism, as practiced by the big doctors profiled in this book, offers the basis for a reconceptualized, rebalanced system of health care in America that will move us beyond the expensive and dispiriting medical swamp in which we have found ourselves in recent years. Toward that end, I offer the following thoughts on the future, a gentle manifesto for the role that primary care can play in improving American health.
TECHNOLOGY AND PRIMARY CARE
Two characteristics of our health care future seem predictable, since they are obvious extrapolations of powerful current trends: continued technological innovation and the ubiquity of information. Together they are going to affect medicine in ways that will underscore the importance of the generalist approach to health care.
Scientific innovation is a permanent feature of the health care system. In the twentieth century biology has given us antibiotics, physics has led
Will the continued application of science to health care lead inexorably to more and more specialization and the extinction of the generalist? Intuitive as a positive response to the question may seem, the history of technology does not, in fact, support it. All technologies tend toward simplification and adoption by a larger and less technically trained set of practitioners. Two of the most successful twentieth-century technologies are prime examples of simplification and dissemination: computers and vaccines. The well-known but instructive story of electronic computation starts with the mainframe, a large and complex piece of equipment entirely managed by computer specialists. Improvements in processing technology and miniaturization transformed the mainframe into the now ubiquitous personal computer. The PC is no longer the domain of the specialist but is available to the public at large.
Through the first half of the century, paralytic polio was treated with progressively complex respiratory support mechanisms, of which the “iron lung” was the most complicated and highly developed. It required substantial resources and specialized personnel to deliver its life-sustaining service. The introduction of the polio vaccine in 1953 eliminated the need for the iron lung and moved the management of polio from a hightech, specialty environment to the pediatrician's office and the public health clinic. Technology radically simplified the “treatment” and delivered it into the hands of generalists.
It is the natural tendency of innovations to move from an exclusive specialty environment to generalists and, sometimes, on to public usage.[1] Medicine is replete with examples of this progression, including blood pressure monitoring, pregnancy tests, and blood glucose checks. Many technologies that were once the domain of specialists are used effectively
This natural migration is being complemented by the upgrading of training and competence in primary care. The minimally schooled GP of the early twentieth century has become the residency-trained and board-certified family physician of today. Primary care internal medicine and pediatric residencies are devoting more time to training new physicians for the technological and systems management aspects of medical practice. The advent of the nurse practitioner and physician assistant represents a dramatic example of educational upgrading, with the training of nurses, military medics, paramedics, and college science graduates as advanced-level clinical practitioners. Programs of continuing education and in-service training, now far more developed than in the past, allow primary care practitioners to modify and improve their competencies as science offers more clinical innovations.
Together, the migration of technology to less specialized settings and the progressive upgrading of the primary care workforce will produce a generalist sector prepared to deal effectively and prudently with many illnesses and conditions that were once the domain of specialty practitioners. This process will be accelerated by the growth of evidence-based medicine, the rapid aggregation of information on clinical processes and outcomes that is bringing greater precision to medical practice. Typically, clinical conditions that are poorly understood tend to be dealt with by specialists who work in a problem-solving mode. As a disease is better understood, however, patterns of pathology are discerned, and diagnosis and treatment can be carried out by individuals with less specialized knowledge. Eventually, when the characteristics of the condition are clearly delineated, the diagnosis and treatment can proceed on the basis of guidelines and protocols. This progression means that illnesses previously in the realm of specialists can move “downstream,” with generalists assuming a larger role in their management. HIV/AIDS is a good example, as is the management of diabetes and ear infections by nurse practitioners and physician assistants. And the process does not stop with
Despite the early, natural linkage between technology and specialism, the natural history of innovation is simplification and migration to lowertech, more regularized settings, which make its benefits less expensive and more broadly available. Certainly some technologies—surgical intervention, for instance—will remain the realm of specialists, but many will evolve in a way that will make them natural elements of primary care practices. These trends suggest that the primary care clinician of the future will provide skilled, scientific care for a broader array of conditions promoting integration, continuity, and perspective in the management of human health. Quality, satisfaction, and costs should all be well served.
INFORMATION, INFORMATION, INFORMATION
In the past, scientific information has been available to the medical community in a relatively rarefied and limited form, used largely by researchers and, to some extent, clinicians. Scientific investigation and new clinical knowledge were entirely paperdependent, with medical journals and professional meetings serving as the principal vehicles of information dissemination. Specialty medicine benefited the most from the information that science yielded, forming clinical disciplines built around specific domains of information. Among the most constant allegations against the old GPs was that they “weren't upto-date” and “didn't practice scientific medicine.” Scarce, cumbersome, and arcane, scientific information in medicine barely trickled out to the general public. The electronic revolution, however, means that the information landscape is changing rapidly and permanently. Physicians, patients, insurance companies, and governments will all have access to data in ways that would have been unimaginable in the past. Data on individuals, groups, and populations will make possible all manner of ratings and projections which, in turn, will stimulate the further development of evidence-based guidelines for the management of health and disease. All of this will be readily accessible to health professionals and the public, research scientists and clinicians, specialists and generalists.
Information, indeed, is a vital asset for the future of primary care.
These emerging capabilities suggest a further role for the generalist of the future. The generalist, broadly trained and powered by new information systems, is in a key position to practice population medicine—the intersection between personal care and public health. Generalists working in managed care organizations have been exploring this role, but the longterm commitment of these organizations to patient populations in the current competitive environment has been limited. The prudent use of resources is always important to an organization (private or public, forprofit or not-for-profit), but the investment made in longterm prevention depends on the organization's perception of its longterm responsibility to its members. Whatever the fate of managed care as it has been practiced in the past, the future will surely have systems that care for patients over time, systems that will inevitably value both prudent resource use in the present and good prevention strategies for the long term. Primary care clinicians are well placed to play central roles in these organizations, both by taking primary clinical responsibility for panels of current patients and by playing a leading role in the management and strategic thinking for the long haul.
Genetics is probably the best current example of the intersection of technology, information, and primary care. The success of the Human Genome Project has raised the possibility of genetically driven break-throughs in the diagnosis and treatment of conditions that lie buried in
The answer is no—unless we are seeking to construct a system of endless fragmentation and cost. There is a better solution. Clearly it will take a firm scientific base for a clinician to advise patients on how and when to proceed with expensive and difficult decisions about genetic testing and treatments. But this is a field in which emerging information can move readily from the research setting to clinical protocols and be made available electronically to both doctor and patient. Primary care practitioners are naturally positioned to discuss issues in genetic testing and treatment and should be the first line of counsel and education for patients. Clinical genetics will need to be given clear emphasis in the future training of generalist practitioners to keep them abreast of emerging developments. The alternative notion—that every family would have a geneticist the way they have, say, a dentist—is implausible, and so, by extension, is the notion's application to other emerging areas of human biology that will require similar anticipatory and preventive deliberations. Rather, these situations call for the welltrained generalist who knows the individual well and can help him navigate a system that will surely grow more complicated.
THE BATTLE FOR THE FUTURE
More technology and more and better information are certain to be features of health care in the future. Other probable trends include increased consumer involvement in health care, a strong focus on wellness, and a heightened concern about the quality of care. We are looking at an inexorable demographic shift toward an older population and, since the cost of health care is again on the rise, we can expect constant tensions (personal and public) over health care expenses. In this environment patients are going to continue to need care—smart, able, responsive, affordable healing and succor. New importance, though, will inevitably be
Imagine for a moment a world without primary care, a future that devalues and marginalizes primary care, a projection from today that builds on the most centrifugal and most individualistic tendencies of our present system. Increasing numbers of highly trained but narrow specialists would pursue their crafts in relative isolation. Innovations would be rampant, expensive, poorly validated, and inequitably distributed. Direct-to-consumer advertising would drive much of the system with TV, newsletters, websites, and chat rooms offering a cacophony of information and advice. Patients would shop in a kind of medical food court, choosing providers or interventions based on data acquired from scientific references randomly mixed with exhortations from commercial and selfserving sources. Whatever the appeal of this world might be to the libertarians among us, it is a formula for rapid escalation in costs, maximum discontinuity of care, bad outcomes, and continued barriers to universal coverage.
There is an alternative. The abiding and, in many ways, the most important quality of primary care is that it provides a centering force for both individuals and systems. It offers coordination, integration, and perspective. Primary care provides the human touch—the relationship that will pull the system together and add value for the patient. The future might best be constructed around the empowered generalist model, in which the principal responsibility for patient management resides with primary care practitioners. In this model the generalist and the patient together serve as thoughtful consumers of technology, calling on specialists for advanced or invasive treatments but not for regular care. This is really the general contractor model of health care, borrowed from the construction industry. The general contractor is a broad expert who, working with the client, coordinates specialized activities. Working with the patient, the generalist will decide when to call on a cardiologist, when a psychiatrist is necessary for the treatment of depression, or which of the available cancer centers would be best to work up a newly diagnosed mass in the colon. The generalist will be the human magnet who holds
The aging of our society presents a particular challenge to primary care. Good public health practice and advancing science together are keeping people alive longer, rapidly increasing the size and age of the elderly population. As a result, geriatric care and geriatric medicine will become ever more prominent parts of health care in the United States. These are quintessentially generalist challenges that meld clinical science with issues of quality-of-life and palliative care. It is the generalist who holds the promise of charting a sensible course for patients through the thickets of agerelated illness, where the potential for costly, wasteful, painful, and degrading interventions abound. Perspective, perspective, and perspective will be the running rules of this work, and this is the currency of primary care. The integrative, supportive, educational, and, at times, pastoral role of the generalist will be vital to the future care of the elderly in America.
Despite the impact of technology and informatics, human birth, growth, maturity, debility, and death will continue. Fifty years from now parents will still be tenaciously involved with the health of their children, the elderly will still want to die with dignity, and mental health, birth control, and infectious disease will still be important medical topics. Medical knowledge and medical possibilities will increase, but monitoring and managing the human life cycle is an enterprise that is generalist to the core. This is not a romantic idea but a practical one. We will need the generalist in the future not because we know so little but because we know so much. Balance, navigation, and ombudsmanship will simultaneously become more important to keeping the system effective and human.
PROMOTING PRIMARY CARE
Rescuing American health care from progressive fragmentation and expense will require this country to make some plans. This is the realm of health policy, where values, data, and intellect come together in decisions about the ground rules and funding of our health system. Sometimes these decisions are enabling (funds for biomedical research or the National Health Service Corps), and sometimes they are restrictive (licensure laws and limits on tobacco advertising). Forces outside health care, such as technology and the economy, influence the character of the system, but it is the policy process that offers the most palpable and objective opportunity for shaping health care in America. It is here that primary care must wage battle.
Primary care is peculiarly dependent on health policy. The technological commercialism that drives much of the medical sector today is a natural engine for specialty medicine. The capital investments behind many medical innovations and new pharmaceuticals directly and indirectly promote specialty medicine through such mechanisms as direct-to-consumer advertising and subsidized training for medical specialists in the use of new technologies. The cognitive and nonprocedural work—the talking and deliberating—that comprises much of primary care can claim no such benefactors. Primary care, therefore, is far more sensitive to and dependent on the policies governing health care (laws, regulations, and compensation formulas) than is specialty medicine. If those policies are supportive of primary care and create an environment in which generalism can thrive, the future role of primary care in the system will be a substantial one. If, to the contrary, those policies do not nurture and support the idea of primary care, highly fractionated systems of specialty care will prevail. The nature, therefore, of health policy, in realms from education and reimbursement through the priorities of private purchasers and insurance intermediaries, will be crucial for the success of primary care.
There are six broad areas of policy in which the primary care agenda needs to be articulated and pursued to build a better system. They are: systems reform; compensation; education; professional structure; communication; and leadership.
Systems Reform: Putting Primary Care at the Center
A generalist system needs to be built on a generalist base. Every patient should have a designated primary care clinician who will serve as their
This principle has been at the core of health maintenance organizations since their inception and is also the basis on which systems in many other countries, including Canada and Great Britain, are constructed. The use of the “primary care gatekeeper” by the burgeoning commercial managed care movement of the mid-1990s has created a negative patient reaction to “gatekeeping” and, in some cases, to primary care itself. Patient frustration has been fueled by the unstable commercial health insurance market, in which many businesses switch health plans yearly, requiring their employees to change doctors each time. Continuity, the doctor-patient relationship, and health maintenance are all casualties of the vicissitudes of a situation that has been created not by health policy but by the commercial insurance market. Primary care is going to have to stand firm on the centrality of the generalist to the care of all patients. Despite the churning of managed care plans and patients' objections to heavyhanded gatekeeping, the principle that every citizen have and use a primary care clinician is of paramount importance. The enactment of a singlepayer form of national health insurance would facilitate the creation of a primary care–based system, but the same goal can be attained through the pluralistic system that exists now. Financial incentives and benefit packages need to be structured to promote patient selection of primary care services and a specific primary care clinician. A broad campaign of patient education needs to be undertaken to provide encouragement and support for primary care selection, and patients must be able to keep their primary care providers regardless of the vicissitudes of the insurance world. The route to full implementation of a primary care–based system will depend heavily on creating incentives in health plans for both patients and doctors to make the primary care provider the pivotal player in the system. Public (Medicaid and Medicare) and private insurance plans need to embrace this standard fully, and primary care proponents need to speak firmly in advocating it.
Among the innovations that managed care has brought to primary care practice is capitation, a monthly payment from insurance companies to physicians based on the number of patients enrolled in a practice, regardless of whether the patients are seen. This system has the benefit of giving the physician and the insurance company predictable monthly cash transfers. What it does not cover is “risk”: the likelihood that the patient will need special tests, referrals, or hospitalizations. In
Entering the twenty-first century, more than 40 million Americans are without health insurance. Quantities of evidence confirm that the lack of health insurance is associated with disproportionate debility and death—an enormous inequity in a wealthy country. The barriers to care inherent in the lack of health insurance cause problems all along the spectrum of service delivery, but they are at their most unfair with regard to primary care. The United States is today the only country in the developed world that does not have a system in place to assure primary care services to all of its citizens. Universal coverage must be at the top of any policy agenda and an integral part of a primary care–based system.
Compensation: Pay Parity for Primary Care
Payment policy is of critical importance to any field. Over the years primary care has been systematically underpaid. As specialty medicine emerged in the first part of the twentieth century, its practitioners were able to charge paying patients “usual and customary” fees for their services that were well in excess (on an absolute and on a per-hour-worked basis) of those charged by primary care physicians. In the latter part of the twentieth century, with the emergence of systematized billing and the universal adoption of relative value scales, the differential between primary care pay per hour and specialty pay per hour became entrenched in the system. Diagnostic and therapeutic procedures can be billed at rates far in excess of what nonprocedural physicians can expect to be paid for their time. This differential has played a central role in attracting physicians into specialty medicine and promoting a system that is heavily sub-specialty-based. We must pay our generalists on a par with our specialists,
Health care legislation in recent years has been incremental rather than omnibus. The failure of the Clinton health reform effort and the subsequent passage of legislation such as the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (the Kennedy-Kassebaum Act) and the 1997 State Child Health Insurance Program suggest that the efforts to expand health insurance coverage will develop piece by piece. Whatever the shape of the increment (for children, for mothers and children, expanded Medicaid eligibility, lowering the age of Medicare eligibility, etc.), primary care will surely be covered, creating both a better financial environment for primary care providers and an increased demand for their services. Both developments will have positive implications for generalist practice, making some clinical settings such as safetynet providers more financially viable and increasing the demand for primary care clinicians.
Compensation policy in the future must be rebalanced to increase the pay for the noninterventional treatment, counseling, and education that generalists provide. Policies designed to do this will have the double benefit of supplying a relative incentive for young clinicians to choose primary care careers and a relative disincentive to procedural overuse in the specialty sector. Both outcomes would provide important stability and cost containment for the system as a whole.
Education: What Are They Learning in School?
If primary care is to be central to the delivery system, it must be central to the missions and curricula of medical, nursing, and other health science schools. The selection of students, course offerings, faculty role modeling, and institutional values all exert powerful influences on the career choices and attitudes of future clinicians. Medical education is particularly challenged in this regard because medical schools double as research centers, with faculty salaries, promotion, and prestige often tied to research achievements. In this environment, primary care is easily marginalized and discounted. Few generalists serve as department chairs in internal medicine or pediatrics; many of the bestknown medical schools have been reluctant to develop family medicine departments; and everywhere faculty members challenge students interested in generalist careers with disparaging comments about primary care. Medical education at all of these institutions is nonetheless built on a primary care base, with generalist physicians teaching the foundation courses in physical diagnosis
Health professions schools, and particularly medical schools and teaching hospitals, need to put a high priority on the task of educating the generalist. The size and quality of the primary care workforce needs to be seen as one of their core responsibilities and measures of their success—not as an afterthought to training specialists or creating new biomedical technologies. This is not an easy mission, and it cannot be relegated—as it often has been—to rural or statesupported schools. It needs to be manifest at all of our educational institutions, including those that are private, urban, and research-oriented. Currently there is no commonly defined “core curriculum” for primary care. Departments of pediatrics, internal medicine, and family medicine rarely collaborate on educational substance, even though there is considerable overlap in the clinical principles they are charged with teaching. Bridges—causeways, really—need to be constructed between admissions strategy, the preclinical and clinical curriculum, and residency instruction in the primary care disciplines. Many of these principles and much of this instruction pertain to the training of physician assistants and nurse practitioners as well, inviting the creation of a modular, interdisciplinary curriculum. Streamlining and coordinating the core generalist curriculum would provide welcome efficiency and collegiality for all students of primary care.
Training for the generalist must include not only clinical medicine but also instruction in systems and systems management, informatics, decision science, and communications. Courses normally taught in graduate schools of business, social work, and communications need to be incorporated into the health sciences curriculum. These are skills that will produce a practitioner with a more diverse set of capabilities and position these clinicians to work effectively and centrally in the health care environment of the future. Adapting the findings and implications of genetic information to the primary care curriculum will be another important challenge, as will developing better and more extensive teaching in geriatrics. The many issues entailed in the development of a primary care–based system in the United States, in fact, call for new knowledge not only in clinical areas but also in epidemiology, health services research, economics, and sociology. These are tasks for academic health centers.
Government funding provides important levers in educational policymaking, and all levers should be pulled on behalf of primary care. State governments are principal players in the funding of medical schools and
Targeted subsidies for training in primary care medicine, nurse practice, and physician assistant programs have been part of Titles VII and VIII of the Public Health Service Act since the 1960s. The support for these programs is relatively modest compared to Medicare GME funds. Nonetheless, they provide valuable venture capital for educational institutions prepared to engage in new and creative education. Over the past three decades, these funds have been instrumental in the development of primary care programs. Their continued presence and potential augmentation will be important. The National Health Service Corps, which funds scholarship and loan repayment for individuals prepared to work as primary care providers in underserved areas, is also significant in this effort. Finally, the training programs of the Department of Veterans' Affairs provide substantial faculty and residency augmentation to academic health centers. These programs have tended to drift with the subspecialty tide of the last decades but, given the aging and needy population of veterans, the potential for substantial upgrading of primary care service and training in these institutions is considerable.
Professional Structure: Primary Care “Architectural” Reform
Primary care has (at a minimum) five different manifestations: family medicine, pediatrics, internal medicine, nurse practice, and physician assistants. While this structure is understandable historically, it creates confusion with the public and uncertainty among payers and providers themselves. Although some degree of ferment within primary care is healthy,
Proposals for the merger or realignment of the primary care disciplines, however, have gone nowhere. Collaboration between pediatricians and internists has led to a double residency—a training route that produces an internistpediatrician with two board certifications. Talks between the board-certifying organizations in internal medicine and family medicine failed to produce a new alliance. The gulf between nursing and medicine remains large and contentious as nurse practitioners increase their training and skill level while insisting that they remain “nurses” and not “doctors.” Physician assistants and nurse practitioners are both adamant about their origins and the nuances in their training programs and modes of practice. The possibility of collaboration, let alone codification, within the primary care community seems remote. Nonetheless, new thinking and cooperation are badly needed.
The presence of large numbers of residency-trained family physicians in primary care suggests a starting point for discussions of realignment. Family physicians are more numerous in smaller and rural communities, where their broad capabilities offer an efficient means of primary care delivery. In cities, general internists and pediatricians provide a higher proportion of generalist services, though family practice residencies and practitioners are becoming more common. The doubly trained medpeds physicians, likewise, offer a kind of family-doctor-less-obstetrics model for urban and rural areas. The advent of the hospitalist offers further grounds for reconsidering the arrangement of primary care, with the possibility of dividing the terrain between the ambulatory generalist and the inpatient generalist.
If empirical evidence bears out the promise of nonphysician clinicians (nurse practitioners and physician assistants) providing primary care at the level of physicians, it would make sense to formalize their training at the doctoral level. Such a strategy would unify and upgrade the education of primary care clinicians. Credit would be given for previous clinical experience (as a nurse, for example), training programs for the two disciplines would be standardized, and an internship year would be added to intensify clinical training. Graduating with a doctoral degree, practitioners would join the workforce with didactic and practical training in the full scope of primary care.
Simplification and standardization of the architecture of primary care would help immeasurably in the delivery of service as well as in policy
Communication: A Better Message
While health care professionals may have a clear understanding of primary care, many members of the public do not. The idea is not as simple as general practice once was and not as intuitively obvious as, say, the specialty of cardiology. The mission of primary care is complicated because it is, quite literally, so big. Primary care is complex because it entails caring for people through all stages of life, treating multiple interrelated conditions, dealing with physical and mental health, and keeping an eye on family and community issues as well as public policy as it relates to health. It is difficult to capture this mission neatly with simple labels or phrases, resulting in a considerable lack of understanding about the nature, potential, and persona of primary care.
How, then, is primary care to be packaged, explained, popularized, and publicized? Is there a television series to be made that could feature the work of a family physician and nurse practitioner? Are there profiles for Parade magazine or the Sunday supplement to be written about primary care “heroes”? How do we explain the issues of compensation policy or graduate medical education reform on the oped pages of the nation's newspapers? These challenges and a dozen more are the domain of communications policy and must be a part of the overall primary care strategy.
Leadership: Who's in Charge Here, Anyway?
For primary care to thrive in the United States, smart strategic leadership will be critical. This premise immediately raises the question of who speaks for primary care? Primary care has many manifestations, each of which has its own educational continuum, certifying authorities, professional organizations, journals, and turf. Family physicians speak with one voice and nurse practitioners with another. Some pediatricians see themselves defined entirely by child health and some internists by geriatrics.
The creation of a national primary care coalition would address the absence of leadership in the field. Such a coalition would move the representation of primary care from an avocational status to a professional one, playing a principal role in primary care policy issues, engaging in analytical and political activities, providing professional and public education, and representing the primary care community to the government and the public. It would sponsor publications and convene professional meetings. It would give muscle and voice to the primary care movement.
Participation in such an alliance could extend well beyond the medical and nursing groups involved in the delivery of primary care. Citizen organizations, managed care organizations, employers, and payers might all take part. The business community, with a large stake in the future costs of health care, should be heavily involved, as should trade unions, consumer groups, and the public health community. The coalition itself would be a training ground for the leaders who will develop and articulate the policy positions for primary care in the future. Such an organization could radically redefine the mission and effectiveness of primary care.
OUR CHOICE
Our success in these areas of public policy will determine to a great extent the nature of the health care delivery system in the United States in the years to come. The obvious forces at play are political and economic, but the outcome will reflect our values and philosophy as a country. Will we work to give all of our citizens affordable, humanistic care? Will we commit ourselves to principles of equity and effectiveness in health care, a course that will inevitably lead to a primary care–based system? Or, to the contrary, will we promote individualized, technological solutions to medical problems regardless of the consequences for the society as a
I am optimistic. I believe big doctoring will prevail. It will prevail because generalism is a powerful organizing concept itself and has a long history in medical care. It will also prosper because new technologies themselves will create a growing demand for interpretation, coordination, and the human touch to provide entrée to the system, continuity of care, and succor in times of sickness and death. Under whatever name, this will be primary care in America.
Acknowledgments
The idea for Big Doctoring in America first took shape more than ten years ago. Since then many people have contributed oral histories, editorial commentary, and helpful advice to the project. Although I will surely fail to mention some, I want to acknowledge as many of those as possible.
First, I thank individuals whose support made the entire enterprise possible. Steve Schroeder, Lew Sandy, and Susan Hassmiller of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation provided funding and encouragement from early in the project. The Pew Charitable Trusts have also provided generous core support. Special thanks go to Rebecca Rimel and Carolyn Asbury.
Dan Fox, president of the Milbank Memorial Fund, has been an important friend and colleague. In addition to providing financial support, he has been a commentator, critic, and editor of my writings (Big Doctoring in America and others) and selected Big Doctoring in America for publication in the series California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public. My special thanks go to Dan for his vision, advice, and support.
Seventy-five physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants gave generously of their time and life stories in providing me with oral histories for the project. Fifteen of their stories appear in the book, and the oral histories of the other sixty have been deposited in the Primary Care Oral History Collection at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. Those individuals deserve special thanks from me and others who will study the history of primary care at the end of the
Numbers of people helped along the way by providing suggestions for good candidates for oral histories. Thanks in this category go to Oli Fein, Steve Cohen, Jack Colwill, Jim Schneid, Dan Onion, Steve Kairys, John Wasson, Gil Welsh, and Elliott Fisher.
Two important figures in American letters and leading practitioners of their particular forms of biography, Studs Terkel and John McPhee, generously coached me on the techniques of personal journalism, the interview, and the recording of oral history.
When the final manuscript was completed, the Milbank Fund assembled a group of experts in primary care, medical history, and health policy to review the draft. As a result of their comments, I undertook major and beneficial rewriting. I thank them for the time and interest they took. They were Ruth Ballweg, Michael Carter, Carolyn Clancy, Jack Colwill, Ann Davis, Nancy Dickey, Mary Anne Dumas, Bob Graham, Gordon Moore, Ed O'Neil, Joyce Pulcini, Richard Roberts, Lawrence Ronan, Lewis Sandy, Barbara Starfield, Rosemary Stevens, and John Stoeckle. Additionally, a number of other primary care physicians reviewed the manuscript and gave me feedback: Joshua Sharfstein, Malathi Srinivasan, Adam Gordon, Scott Gottlieb, Paul Jung, Beaulette Hooks, and Greg Randolph.
During the five years that I spent collecting oral histories and working on the text of Big Doctoring in America, I was based at the health policy journal Health Affairs published by Project HOPE in Bethesda, Maryland. I thank John Iglehart, Health Affairs' founding editor, who provided friendship, advice, and a wonderful place to work during this
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Gerard F. Anderson, Jeremy Hurst, Peter Sotir Hussey, and Melissa Jee-Hughes, “Health Spending and Outcomes: Trends in OECD Countries, 1960– 1998,” Health Affairs, 2000; 19(3):150–157.
2. World Health Report 2000. Available at: http://www.who.int/whr, accessed February 26, 2001. See also Barbara Starfield, “Is US Health Really the Best in the World?” Journal of the American Medical Association, 2000; 284:483–485.
CHAPTER ONE
1. Fitzhugh Mullan. “The Mona Lisa of Health Policy: Primary Care at Home and Abroad,” Health Affairs, 1998; 17(2):118–26.
2. Primary Care: America's Health in a New Era, ed. Molla S. Donaldson, Karl D. Yordy, Kathleen N. Lohr, and Neil A. Vanselow (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1996), p. 1.
3. Institute of Medicine, A Manpower Policy for Primary Health Care (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1978), pp. 16–20.
4. There is a considerable body of literature on the cost, quality, and patient satisfaction related to primary care. Particularly useful in this regard is chapter 3 entitled “The Value of Primary Care” in Primary Care: America's Health in a New Era, ed. Donaldson et al.; Barbara Starfield, Primary Care: Balancing Health Needs, Services, and Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and chapter 1 entitled “What Is Primary Care?” in Eric J. Cassell, Doctoring: The Nature of Primary Care Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press/Milbank Memorial Fund, 1997).
5. Barbara Starfield, “Primary Care and Health: A Cross-National Comparison,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 1992; 268:2032–2033.
6. Avedis Donabedian as quoted by Fitzhugh Mullan in “A Founder of Quality Assessment Encounters a Troubled System Firsthand,” Health Affairs, 2001; 20(1):138.
7. Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Doubleday Currency, 1990) p. 3.
8. Important sources on the history of primary care in the context of the medical system in general are Rosemary Stevens, American Medicine and the Public Interest (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971; 1998), and Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982). The later chapters of John Duffy, The Healers: A History of American Medicine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), are also helpful. The essays in John D. Stoeckle and George Abbott White, Plain Pictures of Plain Doctoring: Vernacular Expression in New Deal Medicine and Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), tell a great deal about rural medicine in the pre–World War II period—particularly the chapter entitled “Primary Care in the 1930s” (pp. 52–80).
9. Committee on the Cost of Medical Care, Medical Care for the American People: The Final Report of the Committee on the Cost of Medical Care, Publication No. 28 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), p. 63.
10. American Medical Association, Directory of Approved Internships and Residencies, selected years as cited by Stevens, American Medicine, and the Public Interest, p. 393.
11. Kerr White, T. Franklin Williams, and B. G. Greenberg. “The Ecology of Medical Care,” New England Journal of Medicine, 1961; 265:885–893.
12. This discussion of the history of family medicine is drawn from Family Practice: Creation of a Specialty: A Narrative of Events Leading to the Establishment of the American Board of Family Practice in 1969 and Reminiscences of Men Who Were on the Scene (Kansas City, Mo.: The American Academy of Family Physicians, 1980); Stanley R. Truman, M.D., The History of the Founding of the American Academy of General Practice (Kansas City, Mo.: Warren H. Green, Inc., and the American Academy of General Practice, 1969); R. Neil Chisholm, “The History of Family Practice” in Family Medicine: Principles and Practice, ed. Robert B. Taylor (Kansas City, Mo.: Springer-Verlag, 1978) pp. 7–12; and David P. Adams, “Evolution of the Specialty of Family Practice,” Journal of the Florida Medical Association, 1989; 76:325–329.
13. For a more complete discussion of the history of the nurse practitioner and physician assistant professions please see chapter 3 of this volume, “The New Clinicians.”
14. Association of American Medical Colleges, AAMC Data Book: Statistical Information Related to Medical Schools and Teaching Hospitals, January, 1999. Table B-13, p. 31.
15. The Registered Nurse Population, March 2000: Findings from the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses—March 2000 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services
16. American Academy of Physician Assistants, Information Update, October 8, 1999, Alexandria, Va., p. 3.
17. Sarah Brotherton, Frank Simon, Sandra Tomany, “U.S. Graduate Medical Education, 1999–2000,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 2000; 248:1121–1126.
18. Robert M. Wachter and Lee Goldman, “The Emerging Role of ‘Hospitalists’ in the American Health Care System,” New England Journal of Medicine, 1996; 335(7):514–517.
19. A. Fernandez, K. Grumbach, L. Goitein, K. Vranizan, D. H. Osmond, A. B. Bindman, “Friend or Foe?: How Primary Care Physicians Perceive Hospitalists,” Archives of Internal Medicine, 2000; 160(19):2902–2908.
20. Mary O. Mundinger et al., “Primary Care Outcomes in Patients Treated by Nurse Practitioners or Physicians: A Randomized Trial,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 2000; 283:59–68.
CHAPTER THREE
1. Joel Alpert, “The Ambulatory Pediatric Association,” Pediatrics, 1995; 95 (3): 422–426.
2. John Noble, Lee Goldman, Sandra Marvinney, and David Dale, “The Society for General Internal Medicine from Conception to Maturity: 1970s to 1994,” Journal of General Internal Medicine, 1994; 9(8) (Supplement):S1–S44.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. Henry K. Silver, Loretta C. Ford, and S. G. Stearly, “A Program to Increase Health Care for Children: The Pediatric Nurse Practitioner Program,” Pediatrics, 1967; 39:756–760; Henry K. Silver, Loretta C. Ford, and L. R. Day, “Pediatric Nurse Practitioner Program,” Journal of American Medical Association, 1968; 204:298–303; and Loretta C. Ford, “Nurse Practitioners: History of a New Idea and Predictions for the Future,” Nursing in the 1980s, ed. Linda Aiken (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1982).
2. U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Nurse Practitioners, Physician Assistants, and Certified Nurse Midwives: A Policy Analysis (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1986), and P. C. Myers, D. Lenci, and M. G. Sheldon, “A Nurse Practitioner as First Point of Contact for Urgent Medical Problems in a General Practice Setting,” Family Practice, 1997; 6: 412–417.
3. The Registered Nurse Population, March 2000: Findings from the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses (Washington, D.C.: Department of
4. Edward Sekscenski, Stephanie Sansom, Carol Bazell, Marla Salmon, and Fitzhugh Mullan, “State Practice Environments and the Supply of Physician Assistants, Nurse Practitioners, and Certified Nurse Midwives,” New England Journal of Medicine, 1994; 231:1266–1271; and L. J. Pearson, “Annual Update of How Each State Stands on Legislative Issues Affecting Advanced Nursing Practice,” Nurse Practitioner, 1999; 24:16–19, 23–24, 27–30.
5. C. L. Hudson, “Expansion of Medical Professional Services with Non-Professional Personnel,” Journal of American Medical Association, 1961; 176: 839–841.
6. Useful reflections on the history of the physician assistant profession include Ronald Berg, “More Than a Nurse, Less Than a Doctor ,” Look, September 6, 1966; Reginald D. Carter, “Socio-Cultural Origins of the P.A. Profession,” Journal of the American Academy of Physician Assistants, 1992; 9:655– 662; C. E. Fasser, “Historical Perspectives on P.A. Education,” Journal of the American Academy of Physician Assistants, 1992; 5:663–670; Steven Cornell “Once Upon a Time: Longtime P.A.s Talk about the History of the Profession,” Advance for Physician Assistants, July 2000, pp. 48–50; and Marianne Mellon, “P.A. Profile: Looking Backward,” P.A. Today, September 28, 1998, pp. 20–30.
7. American Academy of Physician Assistants, Information Update, October 8, 1999, Alexandria, Va., p. 3.
CHAPTER FIVE
1. The earliest history of the HMO movement is captured by Paul de Kruif's Kaiser Wakes the Doctors (London: Jonathan Cape, 1944). Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982), gives a good description of the early modern HMO movement (pp. 393 ff.), and R. Adams Dudley and Harold S. Luft, “Managed Care in Transition,” New England Journal of Medicine (2001; 344:1087–1092), provides a review of the evolution of managed care through the late 1990s. The primarycare gatekeeper phenomenon is well explored in two articles: Kevin Grumbach et al., “Resolving the Gatekeeper Conundrum: What Patients Value in Primary Care and Referrals to Specialists,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 1999; 282: 261–266; and Thomas Bodenheimer, Bernard Lo, and Lawrence Casalino, “Primary Care Physicians Should Be Coordinators, Not Gatekeepers,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 1999; 281: 2045–2049.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. I am indebted to Clayton Christensen, Richard Bohmer, and John Kenagy who present this thesis in an article entitled “Will Disruptive Innovations Cure Health Care?” Harvard Business Review, September–October, 2000, pp. 102–112.
Index
Abdelhak, Sharif, 160
abortions, 32, 65
Adams, John, 214
Adler, Connie, 18, 29–37
adolescent health care, 91–94; AIDS and, 188
adult care, 96
AFL-CIO, 194
African Americans, 47, 61–64, 127, 141, 179, 190, 194, 205, 216; discrimination against, 66, 160, 211; education of, 151–52, 154, 196–98; HIV/ AIDS among, 188; in northern New England, 69, 112, 117, 121; medical experiments on, 43–44; in south, 116. See also civil rights movement
Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, 57
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 57
AIDS. See HIV/AIDS
Albert Einstein Medical Center Northern Division (Philadelphia), 155
Albion College, 196
alcohol abuse, 27, 66, 84, 92, 93
Allegheny Health Education and Research Foundation (AHERF), 159–60
allergists, 157
alternative medicine, 15
Alzheimer's disease, 71
Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, 49
ambulatory medicine, 14, 56, 157
Ambulatory Pediatric Association (APA), 56
American Academy of Family Physicians, 11, 18, 26; Reporter, 38
American Academy of General Practice (AAGP), 11, 17, 18, 26; Willard Committee, 10
American Academy of Pediatrics, 55, 91
American Association of Colleges of Medicine, 10
American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine, 202
American Board of Family Practice, 11
American Board of Medical Specialties, 202
American College of Physicians, 9, 55, 57; Observer, 163
American College of Surgeons, 9, 20, 55
American Journal of Public Health, 119
American Medical Association (AMA), 14, 18, 186; Journal of, 97; Millis Commission, 10; Sawyer Committee, 11
American Osteopathic Association, 202
American Psychological Association, 186
Amherst College, 61
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, 167
Anabaptists, 208
Anaconda American Brass, 194
anesthesia, 9, 10, 86; in obstetrics, 43
Angoff, Kris, 88
Annals of Internal Medicine, 161
Annie E. Casey Foundation, 73
Anthony L. Jordan Health Center (Rochester, New York), 127
antisepsis, 9
antiwar movement, 32, 41, 140
Apollo project, 125
Area Health Education Center (AHEC), 122
Arizona State University, 102
Asian Americans, 141
Association for Ambulatory Pediatric Services, 56
asthma, 52, 78
AT&T, 65
Augusta General Hospital (Maine), 129
Austria, 31
AZT, 188–90
Ball State Teacher's College, 209
Bangor Theological Seminary, 122
Batalden, Paul, 79
Baty, James Marvin, 87–88
Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights, 186
Bell's palsy, 156
Berrigan, Daniel, 32
Berwick, Donald, 79
Bethesda Family Practice Clinic (St. Paul), 170, 172
Bethesda Lutheran Hospital (St. Paul), 169, 171–72
Beth Israel Hospital (New York), 51
Beverly, Edmond, 204
Black Panthers, 141
Blue Cross, 25, 156
board certification, 155, 223
Boh, Trine, 66–67, 72–73
Boston City Hospital, 59, 61, 64–65, 67–68, 86
Boston Dispensary, 86, 87
Boston Floating Hospital, 86–87
Boston University School of Theology, 168
Boufford, Jo Ivey, 45–47
Bowman, Sallyann, 137, 149–64
Bradley, Bill, 201
breast cancer, 153–54, 175
Brigham Hospital (Boston), 61
Britain, health care system in, 230
Bronx Lebanon Hospital Center, 48–51
Brown, Rita Mae, 163
Burroughs Wellcome, 190
Butler, Ruth, 90
Caen, Herb, 185
California Pacific Medical Center, 190
Calman, Maurice Samuel, 39–40, 46
Calman, Neil, 19, 38–54
Campbell, James, 43
Canada, health care system in, xiii, 4, 230
cancer research, 41
capitation, 230–31
carditis, 87
Carnegie Institution, 76
Carter, James, 78
Case Western Reserve University Medical School, 58, 74, 77–79
Catholics, 151–53, 213, 216
CAT scans, 69, 71, 167
Cebul, Randall, 79
Center for Comprehensive Health Practice (New York), 46–47
Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 59, 65–66. See also Epidemic Intelligence Service
Centers of Osteopathic Research and Education (CORE), 203
Chávez, Cesar, 44
Chestnut Hill College, 153–54
Chicago riots (1968), 211
Child Health Services (Manchester, New Hampshire), 83–85, 90–93
child psychiatry, 88
Children and Youth (C and Y) clinics (New Hampshire), 89
Children's Defense Fund, 90
Chillicothe County (Ohio) Veterans' Administration, 203
Chinese Americans, 140
chloramphenicol, 86
cholera, 60
cholesterol, 70, 71, 79
Christ House (Washington, D.C.), 207, 215, 216, 218–19
Church of the Brethren, 208
Church of the Savior (Washington, D.C.), 211–13, 219
City College of New York, 115
civil rights movement, 32, 59, 62, 140, 179, 198
cleft palate, 89
Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital, 77
Clinton, Bill, 12, 36, 136, 232
Colombia, health care system in, xiii
Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (New York), 113–15, 119
Columbia Road Health Service (Washington, D.C.), 207, 213, 214, 216, 218–19
Columbia University, 14, 35
Committee on the Costs of Medical Care, 9
communications policy, 236
Community Action Program, 62, 89
Community Family Practice (Detroit), 199–200
Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV), 216, 217, 218
Community of Hope (Washington, D.C.), 212, 214
compensation policy, 231–32
Comprehensive Health Manpower Training Act (1971), 97
computers, 222, 225
Concordia College, 167, 178
congenital heart defects, 34
Conger, Beach, 57–73
Congo, 209–10
Congress, 56, 96, 156, 201–2
contagious diseases, 24
contraceptives, 65
Cook County Hospital (Chicago), 23, 24, 43
Cornell University, 32, 125, 126
cost of care, 78–80, 146
counseling, family, 34
Country Doctor Clinic (Seattle), 30
Coyote, 128
Crippled Children's Clinic (New Hampshire), 89
Cultural Revolution, Chinese, 140
cystic fibrosis, 89
Dartmouth Medical School, 22–23, 33–34, 79; Mary Hitchcock Clinic, 27, 68
Darwinism, 17
Davidoff, Frank, 57
Davies Medical Center (San Francisco), 186, 190
D.C. General Hospital, 212–13, 217, 219
DDI, 189
Dead Sea Scrolls, 42
death and dying, dealing with, 190
Deitch, Selma, 58, 83–94
Delbanco, Thomas, 57
DeLee, Joseph Bolivar, 23
Democratic Party, 31; 1968 National Convention of, 141
dermatology, 157
Detroit News, 198
Detroit riots (1967), 197–98
diabetes, 108–10, 175, 223
diagnosis, 151, 155, 156, 199–200; of AIDS, 188, 189; genetics and, 225; nursing versus medical, 126–27; technological innovation and, 222, 223
domestic violence, 27, 36, 92–93
Donabedian, Avedis, 5
Drexel University, 160
Dritz, Selma, 185
drug abuse, 27, 215, 218; children and, 84, 85, 92; treatment of, 66; violence and, 93
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), 105
Duke University, 99, 112, 113, 115–19, 122; Medical Center, 97; School of Medicine, xviii
dysfunctional families, 92
ear infections, 223
early-childhood education, 88
echocardiography, 223
Edelman, Marian Wright, 29
educational policy, 232–34
elderly, care of. See geriatric care
electrocardiograms, 222, 223
1199 hospital workers' union strike, 46, 54
Ellis Island, xiv
Ellwood, Paul, 135
El Salvador, war in, 214
emergency medicine, 185, 210, 212
Emory University, 118–19
Empty Closet (publication), 128
Epidemic Intelligence Service, 65, 71
epidemiology, 10, 56, 59, 60, 65; of AIDS, 187; of sexually transmitted diseases, 185
epiglottitis, 86
Eschtruth, Glen, 210
Espada, Pedro, 47, 48
Estes, Harvey, 117–18, 122
Evanston Hospital (Illinois), 210
evidence-based medicine, 223
Family Medical Leave Act, 201
family practice, 2, 4, 18, 19, 76–77, 81, 82, 103, 139, 210, 234, 235; admitting privileges of, 47, 48; general practice transformed into, 26; HMOs and, 142–43; nurse practitioners and, 96, 109, 129–30; physician assistants and, 117–18; and referrals to specialists, 70; residency programs for, 11, 18, 45–48, 50–51, 141, 169, 170, 232, 233; rural, 125; technology and, 223. See also Adler, Connie; Calman, Neil; Halaas, Gwen Wagstrom; Kapla, William; Ross-Lee, Barbara
family-support workers, 90, 91
Farrakhan, Louis, 63
Faverman, Gerald, 202
Federal Health Professions Act, 11
fetal monitoring, 26
Filipinos, 66, 140
Flexner, Abraham, 20
Ford, Loretta, 96
Ford Hospital (Detroit), 204
foreign medical graduates, 120
fractures, 67–68
France, 31
Franklin Memorial Hospital (Farmington, Maine), 30
gatekeeping, 13, 28, 36, 110, 230
Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, 163
gay men and women, 34, 128, 133, 162–64, 181–85; AIDS epidemic and, 180, 186–92
Geiger, Jack, 62
genetics, 225–26
Georgetown University Hospital, 212
Georgia Department of Human Resources, Primary Health Care Section, 120
Georgia Office of Rural Health, 120
Georgia State University, 119
geriatric care, 4, 37, 103, 119, 159, 228, 236–37
Gerlaugh, Holly, 99, 124–34
Germany: health care spending in, xii; Nazi, 31, 54
germ theory of disease, 9
G.I. Bill, 10, 17
Gilbertson, Reid, 169
Goetcheus, Janelle, 179, 207–19
Golden Gate University, 66
Gomez, Maria, 216
Gorgas Hospital (Panama), 24
Gottlieb, Michael, 187
graduate medical education (GME), 234
Grady Hospital (Atlanta), 118
Great Britain, health care system in, 4
Great Depression, 22, 23
Great Society programs, 89
Greece, life expectancy in, xiv
Group Health, 173
Gruber, May, 90
Guatemala, 31
gynecology, 33, 65; nurse practitioners in, 96; physician assistants in, 118
Haggerty, Robert, 92
Hahnemann Medical School, 149, 155–57; see also MCP-Hahnemann Medical School
Halaas, Gwen Wagstrom, 137, 165–78
hantavirus, 60
Harvard University; Medical School, 61, 165, 168, 171; School of Public Health, 88
Hawaiians, 140
Headrick, Linda, 58, 74–82
Head Start, 88, 90, 125
HealthAmerica, 142, 155
Healthcare for the Homeless (Washington, D.C.), 207, 214–17
Health Care Reform Task Force, xii, 12
health insurance, 21, 25, 36; catastrophic, 49; employment-based, 10, 13, 17, 136; loss of, and AIDS, 188; single-payer, 36, 230; universal coverage, 231. See also health maintenance organizations; Medicaid; Medicare
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (1996), 232
Health maintenance organizations (HMOs), 4, 13, 28, 93, 110, 135–39, 142–48, 156; community health center contracts with, 50; family practice and, 172; not-for-profit, 157, 165, 166, 173–74; nurse practitioners and, 97, 110–11, 132; physician assistants and, 132; systems reform and, 230. See also names of specific companies
HealthNet, 144, 145
Health Partners (Minnesota), 165–66, 173–76
Health Partners (Philadelphia), 157–59
health policy, 201–2, 229–37; communication of, 236; on compensation, 231–32; on education, 232–34; leadership in, 236–37; on professional structure, 234–36; systems reform of, 229–31
Health Professions Educational Assistance Act (1976), 56
Health Resources and Services Administration Bureau of Health Professions, 50
Health Right, 217
Health Security Act, xii
health service research, 56
heart defects, congenital, 34
heart disease, 175
Hennikoff, Leo, 42
hepatitis, 180, 188
Hickey, James Cardinal, 213
Hidalgo, Therese, 98, 100–111
Hilficker, David, 214, 216
Hippocratic tradition, 139
Hispanics, 35, 47, 127, 190, 214, 216;
― 251 ―discrimination against, 101–2; HIV/AIDS among, 188HIV/AIDS, 50–53, 60, 65, 216, 218, 219, 223; among gay men, 163, 179, 180, 186–92; managed care and, 159; prevention of, 121, 188; as policy issue, 201
Ho, Sam, 137–48
Holocaust, 54
homebound patients, primary care for, 51–52
homeless, health care for, 50, 51, 53, 66, 179, 207, 214–18
hospitalists, 14, 176
hospitals, 25, 34, 200; admitting privileges at, 47, 48; HMOs and, 155; pediatrics in, 86, 88, 91, 111; rural, 103–4; segregated, 62. See also names of specific hospitals
house calls, 25, 86, 114
Howard County (Maryland) Hospital, 212
Hudson, Charles, 97
Human Genome Project, xii, 225
hypertension, 70–71, 155
hypothyroidism, 155
Iceland, life expectancy in, xiv
immigrants, 179; Vietnamese, 214
independent practice association (IPA), 156, 157
Indiana University Medical School, 209
infant mortality, 60, 83
infectious diseases, 60, 65, 71
information, access to, 224–26, 228
inpatient versus outpatient medicine, 14
Institute for Child Health and Development (Manchester, New Hampshire), 90
Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), 79
Institute for Urban Family Health (New York), 38, 39, 48–53
insurance. See health insurance
Internet, 148, 161, 224
internists, 2, 4, 9, 55–57, 103, 234–36; physician assistants and, 119; residency programs for, 11, 76–77, 156–57, 183, 223, 233; technology and, 223. See also Bowman, Sallyann; Conger, Beach; Headrick, Linda
Iran, Shah of, 64
Irene, Sister, 212
Irish Americans, 151
iron lung, 222
Italian Americans, 141, 151
IUDs, 65
Japan, life expectancy in, xiv
Jewish Memorial Hospital (New York), 40
Johnson, Bob, 213
Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 89
Joseph's House (Washington, D.C.), 207, 216, 218
Joy, Margie, 30
Kapla, William, 179–92
Kaposi's sarcoma, 186–87
Keane, Vince, 216
Keene, Friedman, 186–87
Kennedy-Kassebaum Act (1996), 232
King, Angus, 132
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 63, 198, 211
Kingston (New York) Hospital, 47
Korean War, 87, 113
Ku Klux Klan, 195
Lawrence, Robert, 57
lawsuits, 27
lead encephalopathy, 84, 87
leadership, strategic, 236–37
Legionnaire's disease, 60, 71–72
leprosy, 24
lesbians. See gay men and women
Life magazine, 40
litigiousness, 27
Littleton (New Hampshire) Hospital, 26
Loeb, John, 115
Look magazine, 97
Lou Gehrig's disease, 167
Lutherans, 167, 170, 177, 178, 181
Luther College, 178
Luther Seminary, 170
Lyme disease, 167
Maine Advanced Practice Law, 132
Maine Council of Churches, 133
Maine-Dartmouth Family Practice Program, 124, 129
Maine Department of Health, 112; HIV/STD Prevention Program, 121
Maine General Hospital (Augusta), 24, 33–34
Maine Medical Center (Portland), 117
malnutrition, 60
mammography, 173
managed care, 13–14, 21, 36–37, 51–53, 68, 149–50, 161, 166–67, 175–77; allocation of medical resources in, 150–51; capitation in, 230–31; financial constraints of, 191; Medicaid, 51, 53, 142, 157–59, 172, 217. See also health maintenance organizations
Marion Hospital (Indiana), 210
Martin, Don, 214, 218
Martin Luther King Hospital (Los Angeles), 154
Martin Place Hospital (Madison Heights, Michigan), 197, 199
Mary's Center (Washington, D.C.), 207, 216
Massachusetts General Hospital, 61, 64
mastectomy, 153–54
Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Program, 89
maternal-child care, 102, 103
Maxicare, 142, 143
McDade, Harry, 26
McEachern, Edward, 79
McGregor, Eugene, 18, 20–28
McKinney Act (1987), 215
MCP-Hahnemann Medical School, Institute for Women's Health at, 159
Medalie, Jack, 74
MedCenters, 173
Medicaid, 25, 50, 103, 199, 230; bookkeeping requirements for, 28; managed care and, 51, 53, 142, 157–59, 172, 217; obstetrics and, 36; osteopathic medicine and, 202; reform of, 201, 232
MediCal, 142
Medical Committee for Human Rights, xvi, 62
Medicare, xiv, 21, 25, 28, 68, 131, 219, 230, 232, 234
medics, 113–14; training as physician assistants, 98, 112, 115–17
Megan, Mike, 198, 200, 201
meningitis, 86
Mennonites, 208
mentoring, 105
Mesches, David, 47
methadone maintenance, 66
Methodists, 207, 208, 210, 212
Metro Health Medical Center (Cleveland), 77, 79
Metropolitan Hospital (New York), 47
Mexican Americans, 36
Michigan State University, 193, 196, 202, 204; College of Osteopathic Medicine, 198, 200–201
Mid-Hudson Consortium for the Development of Family Practice, 47, 48
midwives, 29–32, 216; managed care and, 52
Montefiore Hospital (New York) Social Medicine Residency Program, 45–47
Moorhead State University, 167
Morocco, health care system in, xiii
Moses, John, xvii–xviii
multiple sclerosis, 167
Mundinger, Mary, 14
muscular dystrophy, 111
Muslims, 211
National Academy of Sciences, xvi; Institute of Medicine, 3
National Guard, 197–98
National Health Service Corps (NHSC), xii, 29, 33, 118, 120, 139, 141, 142, 229, 234
National Institutes of Health (NIH), 97
National Labor Relations Board, 46
National League for Nursing, 97
National Library of Medicine, Primary Care Oral History Collection, xvii
National Teacher Corps, 197, 198
Neuhauser, Duncan, 78, 79
neurology, 31, 154, 156, 167–68
Neuropsychiatric Institute (Fargo, North Dakota), 167
New England Journal of Medicine, 10, 44, 161
New England Medical Center (Boston), 87
New Hampshire Department of Health, 88–89
New Mexico Board of Nursing, Advanced Practice Committee, 105
New Mexico Nurse Practice Act, 105
New York Daily News, 38
New York Herald Tribune, 61
New York Hospital, 114
New York Medical College, 46, 47, 126
New York Times, 38, 156
New York University Dental School, 39
Nicaragua, socialized medicine in, 133
Nixon, Richard M., 118, 135
Noble, John, 57
North Dakota State University, 167
Northwestern University, 140–41; Garrett Theological Seminary, 210
nurse practitioners, 2, 4, 11, 19, 95–98, 217, 234, 235; expanding role of, 14–15; managed care and, 52; pediatric, 96; political organization of, 132; training programs for, 12, 95–96, 104–6, 126–27, 223, 234; in urban community practices, 38, 48. See also Gerlaugh, Holly; Hidalgo, Therese
nurses, 81, 85, 102; shortage of, 97
Nurse Training Act (1971), 96
nursing homes, 119, 125
nutritionists, 90, 91
obstetrics, 21, 37, 102–4; in family practice, 30, 33–36, 48, 168, 170; in general practice, 24, 26; managed care and, 156; nurse practitioners in, 96; services for poor, 23, 43–44
occupational health, 119
Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), 62
Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine, 193, 202–4
Optima Health Care, 91
oral surgeons, 38, 39
orthopedic surgery, 68
osteopathy, 132, 193, 194, 197–204
outpatient versus inpatient medicine, 14
Pace University, 126, 129
PacifiCare Health Systems, 138, 139, 145, 146
Pakistan, 211
Panama, 24
Pan American Airways, 115
Pap smears, 173
Parke-Davis, 197
patient education, 230
payment policy, 231–32
Payne-Whitney Psychiatric Clinic (New York), 114
Peace Corps, 197
pediatrics, 2, 4, 55–57, 68, 81, 103, 234–36; in family practice, 34, 35; history of, 83; hospital, 86, 88, 91, 111; managed care and, 156; nurse practitioners in, 96; residency programs for, 11, 223, 233. See also Deitch, Selma
Pelligrino, Ed, 213
penicillin, 86
Penn State University Medical School, 154
Pennsylvania Department of Welfare, 157
perinatology, 34
Pew Charitable Trust, 214
pharmacists, 105
Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, 153
Philadelphia General Hospital, 149, 152
Philadelphia Inquirer, 161
physician assistants, 2, 4, 11, 81, 95, 97–98, 217, 234, 235; managed care and, 52; political organization of, 132; in rural medicine, 35, 130; training programs for, 12, 97, 110, 115–18, 223, 234. See also Gerlaugh, Holly; Toney, Carl
Piedmont Hospital (Atlanta), 119
Planned Parenthood, 91
pneumonia, 84; Pneumocystis carinii, 187, 189
Poitier, Sidney, 61
polio, 84, 87, 222
poverty: dysfunctionality and, 92, 93; in Guatemala, 31; managed care and, 159; rural, 35, 62, 69, 120, 122; urban, 23, 43, 53, 62–65, 140, 211–19
PPOs, 28
prenatal care, 168, 216; incentive program for, 173. See also obstetrics
Presbyterian Health Services (Belen, New Mexico), 103–4
Presbyterian Hospital (Albuquerque), 103, 110, 111
Presbyterian Hospital (Chicago), 23, 24
Presbyterian Hospital (San Francisco), 183
preventive services, 173
primary care, 1–2; definitions of, 2–3; future of, 220–38; and generalism in human enterprise, 5–8; history of, 8–16; technology and, 221–24; values of, 3–5
Primary Care Organizations Consortium, 57
professional structure policy, 234–36
proprietary health care, 135
protease inhibitors, 189
Protestant ethic, 75
Protestants, 216. See also specific denominations
Providence Hospital (Washington, D.C.), 212, 216
psychoanalysis, 31
psychosocial health care, 88, 92
public health, 59–66, 228; HIV/AIDS and, 180, 186; HMOs and, 138, 142–44, 175; pediatrics and, 83, 84, 88–90; STDs and, 185–86. See also National Health Service Corps (NHSC); U.S. Public Health Service
Public Health Service Act, Title VII of, 11
Quakers, 124, 125, 128, 133, 208
quality improvement, 79–80; managed care and, 146, 157
QualMed, 144
radiation treatment, 154
Ramsey Faculty Associates, 173
Reader's Digest, 60, 61
record keeping, 158
Regions Hospital (Minnesota), 173
replacement transfusions, 86
research, 130; cancer, 41; health service, 56, 75–76, 78–79
rheumatic fever, 86
rheumatology, 155
Rh incompatibility, 86
Rhode Island Department of Children's Services, 73
risk allocation, 230–31
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 11, 57, 96, 117, 214; Advances, 38; Health Policy Fellowships, 201
Rockridge Health Plan, 142
Rogers, David, 57
Ross-Lee, Barbara, 179, 193–206
Rouse, Jim, 211
Rowland, Mike, 32–34
rubella, 205
rural medicine, 29–37, 65, 125; nurse practitioners in, 100, 101, 105, 109, 129, 130; physician assistants in, 117, 120, 122, 130
Rush Medical College, 23, 24, 42–44
Rutgers Medical School, 41–43
safe sex guidelines, 188
St. Francis Hospital (San Francisco), 185
St. Luke's Hospital (San Francisco), 142
St. Paul Family Physicians, 169
St. Vincent Hospital (Santa Fe), 100
salmonella, 60, 65
Samoans, 140
San Francisco Chronicle, 185
San Francisco Family Health Programs, 141–42
San Francisco General Hospital, 141, 142
San Francisco Health Department, 185
Sauder, Kenan, 74
Schumann, Hy, 86
Schweitzer, Albert, 124, 125
seizure disorders, 62, 87, 89
Senge, Peter, 8
sexual abuse, 92
sexuality: adolescent, 85, 92; problems of, 27
sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), 180, 185–88. See also HIV/AIDS
shortage-area medicine, 33, 35
Sidney Hillman Health Center (New York), 39, 49–51
sigmoidoscopy, 223
Silver, Henry, 96
Simmons College, 24
single-payer system, 36, 230
Smith, Isabella, 24–26
Smith, Richard, 97
Snyder, Mitch, 215, 216
social work, 87, 91, 127
Society for General Internal Medicine (SGIM), 57, 78
Society for Research and Education in Primary Care Internal Medicine, 57
So Others May Eat (SOME), 214
Soundview Health Center (New York), 47–48
South of Market Health Center (San Francisco), 66
specialists, 5–7, 45, 68, 130, 155, 220; in community health centers, 48–50; compensation of, 231–32; history of, 8–12, 17, 20, 55; in internal medicine and pediatrics, 55–57; managed care and, 13–14, 36, 146, 150, 176–77; medical schools and, 33; physician assistant, 118; primary care and, 157; referrals and, 26, 69–70, 77, 110, 143, 199–200, 230–31; rural medicine and, 34; scientific information and, 224; technology and, 222–24, 229; volunteer, in innercity clinics, 213
spina bifida, 91
spousal abuse, 27, 36, 92
Stanford University Medical School, 76, 82
State Child Health Insurance Program, 232
Stead, Eugene, 97, 115, 119
Stehling, Barbara Salas, 104
Streat, Toussaint, 141
subspecialization, 5, 45, 55–56, 222, 223
surgery, 9, 10, 77, 103; in family practice, 35; in general practice, 21, 26, 85; oral, 38, 39; philosophical differences between medicine and, 55; referrals for, 68; technology and, 224; unnecessary, 49
Switzerland, health care spending in, xii
systems reform, 229–31
“Take Back the Night” campaign, 128
technological innovation, 221–24, 228, 229
teenagers, and pregnancy, 84. See also adolescent health care
Teen Options, 91
Tenet Corporation, 160
Thomas, Clarence, 202
Toney, Carl, 98–99, 112–23
Tougaloo University, 62
transfusions, replacement, 86
tuberculosis (TB), 195, 210, 217; drugresistant, 60, 218
Tufts Medical School, 32–33, 85–88, 141
typhoid, 24
UCare, 172–73
ultrasound, 223
Unitarians, 124, 125
United Auto Workers, 194
United Farm Workers (UFW) Health Clinics, 44–45
U.S. Army, 31, 194
U.S. Bureau of Maternal and Child Health, 90
U.S. Bureau of Primary Health Care, 120
U.S. Marine Corps, 184
U.S. Navy, 183
U.S. Public Health Service, xi–xiii, 65, 234; Primary Care Policy Fellowship, 57, 113, 121
United Way, 90, 91
Unity Health Care (Washington, D.C.), 207, 217
University of California, Berkeley, 147
University of California, San Francisco, 66, 143, 186
University of Chicago, 23, 39–41
University of Colorado, 96, 181; Medical School, 181–83
University of Maine at Farmington, 35
University of Maryland, 77
University of Michigan, 205
University of Minnesota, 168, 172
University of Missouri, 76; Agricultural Extension Service, 75, 76
University of New England, 112, 122
University of New Hampshire, 22
University of New Mexico, 100–102, 106; Medical School, 104, 110
University of Pennsylvania: Hospital, 162; Medical School, 152, 162; Student Health Services, 161–62
University of Pittsburgh, School of Public Health, 62
University of St. Thomas, 172, 174
University of Washington, Medical Extension (MEDEX) Program, 97
urgent care, 106–7, 110
urology, 28
vaccines, 222
Valley News, 72
Vermont Law School, 67
Veterans' Affairs, Department of, 234
Vietnam War, 11, 41, 65, 140, 183; medics in, 98, 112–15
Vietnamese immigrants, 214
violence against women, 27, 32, 36, 92–93
Visa Physician Placement Program, 120
Visiting Nurse Service, 51
Volunteer Health Care Network, 213
Wall Street Journal, 156
Wallerstein, Harry, 40, 41
Wayne State University, 196–97; College of Education, 197
Weather Underground, 41
weight management, 108
Weir, Reginald, 114
wellness care, 71
Werdegar, Dave, 143
White, Bernie, 164
White, Kerr, 10
Wiggins, Roy, 119–20
W. K. Kellogg Foundation, 214
women doctors, 24; in family medicine, 171; nurse practitioners and, 109; before World War II, 23. See also names of specific doctors
Women's Hospital (Detroit), 194
women's movement, 29, 32, 95
World Health Organization (WHO), xiii
World War II, 10, 17, 24, 31, 85, 140
X rays, 9, 217, 222, 223
Yale University, 32
Zuni Indians, 34
Preferred Citation: Mullan, Fitzhugh, M.D. Big Doctoring in America: Profiles in Primary Care . Berkeley: University of California Press, c2002 2002. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt629020tn/