A Commonwealth Fund survey of nearly 8,500 primary care physicians in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, revealed that U.S. primary care doctors are most likely to spend time dealing with insurance restrictions. The results also indicate that the overall majority of surveyed physicians support fundamental health system change. Additionally, a universal need for all countries to improve communication about patient care was recognized by the survey. The study was published online today in the journal Health Affairs.
The United States was the only country in the survey without universal healthcare, and 69 percent of American primary care physicians reported that more than half of their patients often could not afford healthcare—a sharp contrast to physicians’ reports of patient affordability issues in Norway (4 percent), the U.K. (13 percent), Switzerland (16 percent), Germany (21 percent) and Australia (25 percent). More than half of American physicians indicated that insurance restrictions that impact their care provision decisions are a major concern, American physicians were the most negative about their domestic healthcare system, and only 15 percent of American physicians agreed that the healthcare system in America works well.
The survey noted a substantial increase of American doctors’ use of electronic medical records systems (69 percent in 2012 from 46 percent in 2009), which Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis attributes to recent incentives and national investment plans included in the 2009 economic stimulus legislation. Though both the United States and Canada have made improvements in health information technology use such as the adoption of EMRs, both countries fall far behind world leaders in EMR use with 27 percent of American physicians and 10 percent of Canadian physicians using systems with multi-functional capacities that have the ability to generate patient information, manage patient registries, electronically order prescriptions and diagnostic tests, or provide decision support. By comparison, 68 percent of Swiss doctors provide email access, and 63 percent of Dutch physicians, 53 percent of Norwegian physicians, and 56 percent of U.K. physicians allow patients to request prescription refills electronically.
