Family Medicine’s Role in Generating Evidence to Inform Primary Care Payment Reform and New Care Delivery Models

Given that half of physician office visits are for primary care and family physicians make up 40% of all primary care clinicians in the US, family medicine researchers can play a key role in evaluating and reporting on state and federal innovations to redesign primary care payment and care delivery. We used Dimensions, a comprehensive publications and citations research platform, to measure the impact of family medicine-affiliated scholarship (research articles, letters to the editor, research letters, and editorials) published from 2018 to 2022 in 14 of the highest-impact journals that routinely publish articles on payment and delivery system reform. Among 6212 peer-reviewed articles related to primary care payment and delivery system reform, we found that 519 (8.4%) included at least 1 author with an affiliation with a department of family medicine compared with 1197 articles (19.3%) that had at least 1 author with an affiliation with a department of internal medicine and 504 articles (8.1%) that had at least 1 author affiliated with a department of pediatrics. Taken together, these findings suggest that academic departments of family medicine are lagging in scholarly contributions that evaluate payment and delivery system reform.