The tenth Salus Health Care Forum was convened on February 5, 2025. In attendance were Mitch Applegate, William Bergquist, Jerome Fish, Bill Gillanders, Mark Vukalcic, and Jack Westfall. The Trigger topic for this forum was provided by Warren Newton, a major leader in American family medicine who offered his insights regarding ways in which physicians and other members of the healthcare community might most effectively collaborate with one another on behalf of ongoing improvement in healthcare service.

Following is a narrative based on this February 5 forum:

Warren

I thought that it would be helpful to go back to the beginning, because it’s really what we’ve learned in those early years that has become really the basis of a lot of the changes in residency requirements, and going forward, and is now what we are trying to put together in developing residency learning networks across the country. So, if you go back to the early 2000s, and if you look at the topics of our networks, this is really the history of primary care redesign over 20 years, you go from chronic care to PCMH to the triple aim, and then the quadruple aim, sort of how can you adjust, how can you shape primary care to be responsive to those needs.

So, in the early 2000s, it was the chronic care model, right, which I’m still convinced is probably the major, one of the major things that the Family Medicine for America Health did for, I have a very finicky IV, I’m so sorry, was really saying our patient population has changed a lot since the early 50s, 1950s, and we need to change our clinical care model to do that. And the AAMC put together this new technology of a learning care collaborative collaborating with IHI at the time, they did it nationally, with a single meeting, Ed Wagner got involved, and they did that. And it was successful, people like going, there’s an evangelistic thing. You all get together and talk about it.

But the problem with doing it nationally is that you’re limited to a small number of people who fly into some place. And so we said let’s do it locally. And we were working with philanthropies in North Carolina and South Carolina.