Our Vision:

Reclaim and Reconstitute.

The Green Center works to reclaim and reconstitute the intellectual foundations of primary care, to advance the science of medicine learned and practiced within layered and competing social frameworks of meaning, and to deliver on a now 50 year old promise: better health and improved health care through a synergistic focus on both humanism and healing. We are nimble, inquisitive, curious, and open.

Primary health care has great potential to be a major part of the solution to the most intractable problems of a fragmented, depersonalized, and unsustainable health system. Because of its integrative, personalizing, and prioritizing focus on the whole person, family and community, family medicine has the potential to improve the health of people and populations in ways that foster equity and sustainability. But that potential is limited by misunderstanding what matters about family medicine and primary care. This misunderstanding leads to systems, measurement, and payment that often thwart the improvements they are intended to foster.

The Larry A. Green Center was formed in 2017 to conduct the kind of cutting edge research, development and advocacy that are not supported by other mechanisms, but that have the greatest potential for transformative effects.

Work of the Green Center focuses on four main priorities. Our approach to these priorities is based in the need for vision, sustained partnerships, and integrated learning. We understand that discovery starts with learning how to ask and learning how to ask begins with learning how to listen.

The priority programs of the Green Center are:

Measures

Our work on measures currently focuses on our Person-Centered Primary Care Measure (PCPCM). A New Comprehensive Measure of High-Value Aspects of Primary Care, published in the Annals of Family Medicine, explains the process taken to develop the PCPCM, as well as its reliability and validity.

Foundations

Considerable conversation at the Green Center focuses on how best to describe and support primary care. Understanding where to go requires understanding where we’ve been and where we are.

Emergence

On Friday, March 13, 2020, the Green Center launched its first weekly Quick COVID-19 Primary Care Survey to assess the impact of COVID-19 on practices. We have also conducted two Simulathons to explore agent-based and situational modeling and how they might be applied to modeling primary care.

Conversations

Because of the Green Center’s interest in quick and accurate dissemination, we have begun creating our own YouTube channel, blog, and newsletters. These are currently still under production but stay tuned as they progress.