The Role of Virtual Care in Improving Primary Care Access and Continuity for At-Risk Multimorbid Older Adults

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Project Summary/Abstract This K23 award will establish Ishani Ganguli MD, MPH as a clinician-investigator focused on how care delivery and payment innovation can advance high-value outpatient care and better outcomes for older adults. Dr. Ganguli is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and primary care physician at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Building on her clinical training, methods coursework, and experiences studying care innovation and leading it at an Accountable Care Organization (ACO), this award will allow her to develop expertise in (1) how aging needs, especially for those with multimorbidity and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and AD-related dementias (AD/ADRD), can be met through outpatient care innovation, (2) advanced quantitative methods, and (3) claims-linked electronic health record (EHR) data analysis. To achieve these goals, Dr. Ganguli has assembled a team with expertise in health services research on care innovation (Drs. Ateev Mehrotra, Thomas Sequist), geriatrics (Dr. Christine Ritchie), primary care (Drs. Meredith Rosenthal, Joshua Metlay), quantitative methods (Drs. E. John Orav, J. Michael McWilliams, Craig Pollack), and EHR data analysis (Dr. Christine Vogeli). Primary care access and continuity of care improve outcomes for multimorbid older adults, so a recent decline in primary care office visit rates – likely due in part to barriers attending these visits – raises concerns. Virtual care may enable access and continuity. But we do not know which groups faced office visit barriers pre-dating the Covid-19 pandemic nor how post- pandemic expansion of virtual care will affect primary care access or continuity for these groups. To address these critical questions, Dr. Ganguli will first use the claims-linked Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey to describe visit use and visit continuity of care (COC) associated with reported trouble getting to the doctor’s office and whether adults with AD/ADRD or social risk factors were at greater risk of this barrier (Aim 1). In Aim 2, using difference-in-differences analysis of claims-linked EHR data in a large Medicare ACO, she will assess how post- pandemic expansion of virtual care affects primary care use in these populations. In Aim 3, she will use these claims-linked EHR data to develop a novel application of the COC measure (“touch continuity,” which includes virtual care) and determine if it is associated with risk of preventable hospitalizations. This work and training will provide the basis for a future R01 proposal of a quasi-experimental, multi-health system study of virtual primary care for multimorbid older adults. This K23 award and future R01 will inform how to pay for and deliver virtual care to promote high-value outpatient care and better outcomes for older adults.