Primary care makes significant impact on health care

Here's an excerpt from an article featured in the Fort Worth Business Press that shared key insights from Dr. George Rust, professor of family medicine and director of the National Center for Primary Care at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta and the most recent guest speaker at the Distinguished Speaker Series at the UNT Health Science Center.

...Health disparities are a major concern for the United States, Rust said, but research into disparities is useless unless there are equitable health outcomes. Lowering death rates from a disease is a worthy goal, but unless all groups are equally affected by any changes, research has failed, he said.

To make equal change requires a different approach to research, something the medical community is beginning to accept but funding agencies are more reluctant to support because the data may be harder to interpret, Rust explained. Historically, medical studies have focused on one disease at a time, and patients with other diseases or conditions or who don’t meet strict criteria are not allowed to participate. However, this is not an accurate representation of an American population made up of patients who may have two or three (or more) diseases at once, like diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and depression.

...Additionally, diseases aren’t the only things playing into a patient’s health. Social, economic and cultural factors are also key, like health beliefs, money issues, access to transportation to get to medical care and language barriers, to name a few.

Read the entire article.