Dedicated Health Care Provider - Age 65+ in California

California

Individuals with a dedicated health care provider are better positioned to receive care that can prevent, detect and manage health conditions. Having a regular health care provider helps patients and providers build stable, long-term relationships that are associated with several benefits, including:

• Improved preventive care.
• Improved chronic care management for conditions such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
• Fewer emergency department visits for non-urgent or avoidable problems.
• Reduced mortality.

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.
• Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, white and multiracial adults compared with Hispanic adults.
• Those with higher levels of education compared with those with less than a high school education.
• Those with higher levels of income compared with those with an annual household income less than $25,000.
• Straight adults compared with 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. 
• Reorienting health care systems to encourage patients to use primary care for new symptoms instead of seeking specialists with low-impact and high-cost procedures.
• Addressing care gaps for those without 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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