Care of patients with chronic disease: the challenge for general practice

Care for people with chronic disease is a major challenge confronting our health system, with 77% of Australians reporting one or more long-term health problems and more than half of those aged 65 years and older having five or more conditions.1 Eighty-seven per cent of the population attend general practitioners at least once each year, and general practice provides the majority of care to patients with chronic illness, especially those with mild to moderately severe disease.2 Thus, general practice figures prominently in strategies to address the rise in chronic disease. In this article, we review what has been achieved and what we might yet need to do to achieve better outcomes for people with chronic disease.

With adequate support from specialist services and a systematic approach, general practice can provide good quality of care for patients with most high-prevalence long-term conditions. This has been demonstrated for patients with type 2 diabetes,3,4 hypertension,5,6 and chronic musculoskeletal disorders.7 Optimal care often involves some kind of “shared care” arrangement between generalists and specialists as part of an ongoing relationship among the patient, GP, and specialist. Shared care between primary care and specialists is at least as effective as specialist care alone for patients with moderately severe asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.8,9 A shared care model may also provide optimal care for patients with heart failure.10,11

There are good reasons why, apart from its population reach, general practice is well suited to managing chronic disease. Most patients with chronic diseases have more than one chronic condition. Primary care practitioners are more effective in dealing with comorbidity than specialist providers.12 Patients attending specialist services are less likely than patients in primary care to receive preventive care for conditions unrelated to the specialty.13 General practice also offers continuity of care, which patients with chronic disease seek as their needs become more complex.14

Despite general acceptance of the important role that general practice plays in chronic disease management, only about half of patients receive optimal quality of care and outcomes in Australian general practice. This has been demonstrated in the care of children with asthma,15 and adults with type 2 diabetes16 or hypertension.17

Key factors contributing to this gap between optimal and current practice include (Box 1):

• The dominance of fee-for-service funding of general practice care, encouraging reactive rather than systematic care;

• A lack of multidisciplinary patient care teams within many general practices;

• Limited engagement between general practice and patient self-management education programs;

• Underdeveloped information and decision support systems; and

• A lack of physical infrastructure within many practices to allow workforce diversification.

Many of these factors are addressed by the “chronic care model”,18,19 which has been associated with improved health outcomes and lower health care costs.20,21

The Australian Government has introduced a number of funding initiatives that have gone some way in supporting improved management of chronic disease by GPs and allied health providers (Box 2). These include:

• The enhanced primary care (EPC) programs, which include incentives for GPs to develop structured management plans for patients with chronic illnesses (GPMP) and team care arrangements (TCA) for multidisciplinary care of patients with complex needs;

• Medicare items for patients with team care arrangements to be funded for up to five occasions of service per year from private allied health services and, more recently, for group services;

• Specific funding through the Practice Incentives Program (PIP) for practice systems and completing an “annual cycle of care” for patients with diabetes and a series of planned visits for asthma education and management (originally three and recently reduced to two visits), accompanied by evidence-based management guidelines; and

• Specific funding for practice nurses through the PIP and Medicare items.

In addition to these financial incentives, the Divisions of General Practice have provided support to practices to establish the systems and infrastructure for chronic disease management, such as information management systems and disease registers. Divisions also have an important role in coordinating shared care and liaison programs with specialist services for a variety of chronic diseases.

The Australian National Primary Care Collaboratives (NPCC) form an important quality improvement program that has so far reached more than 600 practices in almost half of the Divisions across Australia.22 The NPCC aim to improve care for patients with complex and chronic conditions largely through peer leadership, decision support and the use of the plan-do-study-act cycle.

GPs have actively taken up some of these incentives — notably the GPMP, TCA and the diabetes Service Incentive Payment (SIP). Other incentives, such as the GP asthma SIP, have been less widely used. Barriers to use of this incentive included paperwork and complexity of Health Insurance Commission requirements and payments.23 Indeed, the number, complexity and administrative burden of all the incentives and initiatives have reduced their impact. Claims for all the EPC items still comprise less than 2% of attendances and, together with the diabetes and asthma SIPs, these incentives provide less than 5% of GP incomes.24 This compares with a third of GP incomes based on quality indicators under the new general medical services contract in the United Kingdom.25

Despite these limitations, there is some evidence that these incentives have at least coincided with improvements in quality of care for patients in general practice. In a cohort of patients in diabetes registers, we found that indicators of quality of care improved following the introduction of the diabetes SIP in 2001.26 We have also demonstrated improved adherence to guidelines and metabolic control for patients who had multidisciplinary care provided as part of a care plan.27

However, although there is some evidence of improved uptake and trends in quality of care, there are few published data to demonstrate that the introduction of these initiatives has been associated with improved patient health outcomes. Likewise, the NPCC have reported impressive improvements in aspects of quality of care.28 However, it has not yet been demonstrated if these improvements will be sustained in the long term or diffused to other practices.

In general, the initiatives appear to have been worthwhile (although they have required some iterations to get right). However, they are too limited to produce substantial reorientation of GP care. Their contribution towards a multidisciplinary team approach has also been limited by the availability of allied health services in the community, restrictions on the eligibility and number of services funded by Medicare, and waiting times for state allied health services, which have become increasingly focused on the care of recently hospitalised patients.29

The GP incentives have provided little to support chronic disease self-management, and few of the Australian Government’s Sharing Health Care Initiative programs have effectively engaged GPs.30 Similarly, although evidence-based guidelines for diabetes, cardiovascular disease and asthma have been distributed, these have not yet been systematically incorporated into practice information systems, continuing professional development and clinical audit requirements.