Miss the Primary Care in the Time of COVID-19 Twitter Chat? Here’s How You Can Revisit It

On June 18, PCC joined many other leading organizations in the primary care community in an hour-long chat on Twitter about the current and future state of primary care during the coronavirus pandemic.

If you missed the conversation, you can read the saved Q&A on Twitter under the hashtag #PrimaryCareCovidChat. Or even if you were part of the chat, you may find a reading of the Q&A at your own pace is more beneficial, since the conversation was very fast-paced and included many answers to each of the nine questions that were posed. Even seasoned Twitter users may have had a hard time keeping up with the conversation! You don’t have to have a Twitter account/be on Twitter to read the conversation.

In addition to PCC, the hosts/participants included: Mathematica, The Larry A. Green Center, 3rd Conversation/X4Health, American Association of Nurse Practitioners, AcademyHealth, California Health Care Foundation, Commonwealth Fund, Milbank Fund, Primary Care Development Corporation, Well Being Trust, National Center for Integrated Behavioral Health at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, along with many other primary care organizations and leaders.

Participants offered many opinions and insights in their answers. Perhaps most beneficial in the reading of the Q&A after the event is discovering many resources that many of the participants provided in their answers—helpful articles and organizational programs and initiatives, for example.

The chat covered a range of topics, including primary care organization, delivery, financing, and workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic. The questions, in order, are provided below as an “index” to the Q&A if you want to read only parts of the conversation or focus on particular topics. The questions are marked by tweets beginning with Q (Q1 for question 1, etc.), and answers are marked in tweets beginning with A (A1 for the answer to question 1, etc).

Questions:

• Q1 COVID-19 effects—on practices, patient-clinician relationships, workforce. What are you seeing? How are you responding?
• Q2 Learning opportunities—to build teams, to integrate behavioral health, to adopt telehealth. What are you seeing? What are you trying?
• Q3 What is the role of primary care in addressing the structural racism that COVID-19 exacerbates?
• Q4 Who’s your primary care hero? Share a shout-out!
• Q5 Clinician burnout and financial stress are more real than ever. How can practices support workforces and each other? What can help practices at risk of closure?
• Q6 As we leave behind volume-based, fee-for-service payment, what could replace it?
• Q7 What aspects of telehealth would you like to see remain post-pandemic?
• Q8 How can primary care position itself to address old and new behavioral health issues post-pandemic?
• Q9 Fill in the blank: By this time next year, primary care will be ______________.

In the chat's Q&A stream on Twitter, the conversation is in reverse chronological order - i.e., scroll down to get to the beginning of the chat.

Even though the live chat is over, you can still contribute to this conversation. Feel free to retweet or like any of past tweets or add your own response to the questions (a Twitter account/handle is required). Just be sure to include the chat’s hashtag (#PrimaryCareCovidChat) in your tweet so it gets added to the stream of answers.