The Familiar Physician: Saving Your Doctor In the Era of Obamacare

Peter B. Anderson · Bud Ramey · Tom Emswiller

Sep 2013 · Morgan James Publishing

About this ebook

Powerful forces of change are at the core of Obamacare—and they could either strengthen or destroy our family doctors. It’s a perfect storm that threatens our hope for more effective and personalized medical care and it holds the potential to drive our trusted Familiar Physicians toward extinction. In the midst of the storm is a new and promising approach within Obamacare called the medical home. Learn what you can do to help assure that the Familiar Physician, the basis for a strong physician-patient relationship, survives the approaching storm. On a national level, there are heroes here—doctors who redirected their lives to make this change happen. Not just for a few months, but for a decade-long crusade. This is the story of Dr. Peter Anderson, a pioneer in team care medicine and a passionate champion for primary care. The Familiar Physician is about the extraordinary vision of IBM’s Dr. Martin Sepúlveda and the powerful crusade of advocacy carried out by IBM’s Dr. Paul Grundy. Their ten-year quest to create solutions for this crisis in primary care has powerful outcomes. Hope is on the horizon, but the struggle is far from over.

About the author

Dr. Peter Anderson, a pioneer in team care medicine and a passionate champion for primary care, struggled for a decade to save his own medical practice while also creating strategies for the tempest descending upon primary care medicine. With co-authors Bud Ramey and Tom Emswiller, two long-standing, award winning health care communicators, Dr. Anderson describes the quickly approaching crisis that holds the potential to impact health care in America for decades.It’s powered by burned-out and frustrated family doctors retiring early with not enough young primary care physicians to replace them; more than 30 million newly insured patients; an aging population; increasing regulations and decreasing reimbursement—and it’s converging with a sea change of healthcare reform in a world of uncertainty. It’s the perfect storm that endangers primary care medicine and threatens to drive our trusted familiar physicians toward extinction.