Practices Caring For The Underserved Are Less Likely To Adopt Medicare's Annual Wellness Visit.

ABSTRACT: In 2011 Medicare introduced the annual wellness visit to help address the health risks of aging adults. The visit also offers primary care practices an opportunity to generate revenue, and may allow practices in accountable care organizations to attract healthier patients while stabilizing patient-practitioner assignments. However, uptake of the visit has been uneven. Using national Medicare data for the period 2008-15, we assessed practices' ability and motivation to adopt the visit. In 2015, 51.2 percent of practices provided no annual wellness visits (nonadopters), while 23.1 percent provided visits to at least a quarter of their eligible beneficiaries (adopters). Adopters replaced problem-based visits with annual wellness visits and saw increases in primary care revenue. Compared to no

SUBMITTER: Ganguli I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6080307 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature