The Pearl Team is Hitting the Road
In May and June, the Pearl Health team is driving from New York to Miami, with detours to visit primary care practices in 10 other major cities — including Philadelphia, Washington DC, Richmond, Raleigh, Nashville, Chattanooga, Atlanta, Savannah, Jacksonville, and Orlando — and a string of smaller metro areas and towns along a 2,000-mile stretch of American highway.
We’re committed to raising the voices of primary care providers across the country. We know the obstacles they are facing on the road to delivering better care. That’s why we’re hitting the road ourselves to meet them where they are.
Along the way, we’ll be soliciting responses to our annual Primary Care Pulse Survey, conducting interviews with providers and clinical staff, recording podcasts with healthcare leaders, and reporting on what it’s like to be a primary care provider in the US today.
Are you a primary care provider or organization interested in meeting with the Pearl Team while we’re on the road? Read more about our trip and contact us through the link below — we’d love to coordinate a visit!
We're Hitting the Road!
We’re launching a tour to meet primary care providers where they are.
Understanding the State of Primary Care in America
In 2023, Pearl Health released our first Primary Care Pulse Report. With survey responses from more than 200 physicians, follow-up interviews, and secondary research, our 2023 Primary Care Pulse identified many of the challenges, impediments, and frustrations that PCPs face today:
- Only 21% of primary care physicians reported that they feel fairly compensated
- Only 29% believed that their pay allows them to provide holistic patient care
We did our best to conduct our 2023 Primary Care Pulse Survey with academic rigor and remain open-minded, yet years of learnings from our provider partners made these bleak findings unsurprising to us.
Complimentary Report
2023 Primary Care Pulse
Download Pearl’s annual Primary Care Pulse report to learn more about challenges and opportunities facing providers today
Notwithstanding the consistent feedback that PCPs feel overworked, under-resourced, and underappreciated, our survey and our everyday interactions with providers across the country also show that some PCPs remain cautiously optimistic about the future of our healthcare system — particularly those who are actively transitioning to value-based care.
In fact, in our 2023 Primary Care Pulse, PCPs who were actively participating in value-based care models responded much more positively than non-participants. Respondents aligned with Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) were:
- 56% more likely to believe they are compensated fairly
- 15% more likely to believe that the way they are paid allows them to provide holistic care for their patient panel
These numbers suggest that ACOs are one path toward a better future for primary care physicians — a future in which they are paid to practice medicine with their patients’ holistic wellness in mind.
While we remain grateful to the PCPs who have responded to our Primary Care Pulse Survey and to those who continue to share their experiences with us remotely every day, we are often reminded of the industry idiom: “healthcare is local.”
With the rise of digital health tools and resources, we acknowledge that healthcare delivery does not need to be “local” in all cases. Yet, despite innovations in digital health, it remains clear that access to healthcare resources — and individual provider and patient experiences — still varies widely across different communities.
Even if you don’t believe healthcare is always local, people’s stories are. We’re hitting the road to visit practices across the country, to better understand the day-to-day experiences of PCPs and their patients, and to help them share those stories.
Our trip from New York to Miami is just the first leg of our journey — we’ll be planning different routes in the future to take our Drive for Better Care across the country. Are you a primary care provider interested in becoming a part of Pearl’s Drive for Better Care in a different region? Contact us at [email protected] to let us know!
