Dedicated Health Care Provider - Age 65+ in Maine

Maine

Individuals with a dedicated health care provider are better positioned to receive care that can prevent, detect and manage disease and other health conditions. Having a regular health care provider helps the patient and provider build a stable, long-term relationship that is associated with several benefits, including:

• Higher rates of receiving preventive care.
• Lower health care costs.
• Better overall health status.
• Fewer emergency room visits for nonurgent or avoidable problems.
• Improvements in chronic care management for asthma, hypertension and diabetes.

Older adults face several obstacles to obtaining the care they need, including transitioning from employer-sponsored health care to Medicare, traveling long distances (especially for those in rural areas) and high out-of-pocket costs.

According to America’s Health Rankings analysis, the percentage of older adults with a dedicated health care provider is higher among: 

• Women compared with men.
• Black and white adults compared with Hispanic adults.
• Those with higher levels of education compared with those who have less than a high school education.
• Those with higher levels of income compared with those who have an annual household income less than $25,000.
• Straight adults compared with lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer (LGBQ+) adults.

Strategies for increasing the prevalence of adults with a dedicated health care provider include:

• Increasing primary care capacity by empowering licensed personnel, including nurse practitioners and physician assistants, to provide more care, particularly in regions with health care workforce shortages. This can be done by enacting scope-of-practice laws that enable nurse practitioners to perform more primary care functions. Scope-of-practice laws lead to increases in the number of nurse practitioners per capita and higher yearly growth of the nurse practitioner workforce. 
• Making systemic and cultural improvements to the accessibility and perception of primary care in order to encourage patients to use primary care for new symptoms instead of seeking specialists with low-impact and high-cost procedures.
• Addressing care gaps caused by lack of health insurance, high cost of care, poor geographic availability of services and language barriers.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services provides a list of Medicare-enrolled physicians and health care professionals by region that can be used to find local providers.

Increasing the proportion of individuals of all ages with a usual primary care provider is a Healthy People 2030 leading health indicator.

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