SOUTHEAST IDAHO — The Patient Quality Alliance would like to recognize the Primary Care Specialist and Wise Medical clinics for achieving excellence in preventative care for their patients in Southeast Idaho. PQA is a clinically integrated network dedicated to improving the quality of care and decreasing health care costs in Southeast Idaho. PQA works with many local and rural health clinics to accomplish these goals. In 2024, PQA challenged all clinics in the network to provide as many annual wellness visits or exams as possible to their patients. Medicare and other insurers provide this service without any cost to the patient as a wellness benefit. The annual wellness visit or exam is designed to have the provider and patient meet, talk over age-appropriate health concerns, make sure immunizations and cancer screenings are up to date and develop a yearly plan to manage the patient’s medical problems. These visits are the center of preventative care and key to decreasing costs of care for our communities and nation while improving the quality of life for patients.

Dr. David Wise at Wise Medical Clinic was able to see 220% of his patients with PQA value-based insurance plans in the first quarter of 2024. Dr. Mark Mansfield and Dr. Richard Maynard and the team at Primary Care Specialist Clinic were also able to see a remarkable 199% of their PQA patients during the first quarter of 2024. Between the two clinics, they were able to see 484 patients and get them well on their way to a healthier way of life. Their caring staffs reached out to these patients, explained the importance of the wellness visit, expressed the concern the providers had for their health and patients responded. PQA would also like to thank the public for responding, using this free benefit and following their providers' recommendations for maintaining or improving their health.

Quality-based care is changing how we provide medical care in the United States. Traditionally, patients come to their provider only when sick. This has become an unsustainable care delivery model that drives up health care costs for everyone. When patients are working together with their providers to prevent and manage health problems, communities can be healthier which reduces emergency room visits, hospitalizations and costs.

Avoiding medical problems and finding and treating them early is much better than the alternative. Dr. Mansfield and his partner Dr. Maynard at Primary Care Specialists were concerned at first when the United States Preventive Services Taskforce recommended that colonoscopy screening should now start at age 45 instead of 50 that they would be finding many of the colonoscopies that they performed would be normal. However, Dr. Mansfield said: “In the past year (they) have discovered and diagnosed colon cancer in people in their 40’s. These patients have now had this potentially devastating disease taken care of early and are moving on with their lives. Had they waited until age 50 to have their colonoscopy, the result would be quite different.”

Dr. Wise said, “Through preventative health measures, we can keep our patients swimming upstream without going over the waterfall of catastrophic illness.”

The wisdom of Benjamin Franklin’s statement penned in the Pennsylvania Gazette back in 1735 is still especially accurate and appropriate today. He stated, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

For about 300 years, health care has ignored his wisdom, but we can no longer brush it aside. It is time to concentrate on the “ounce of prevention” for both providers and patients. We applaud Wise Medical Clinic and Primary Care Specialists Clinics and all other participating clinics and patients for their efforts in taking control of their health and preventing and controlling their medical problems.