OW2024: Insights for Delivering Obesity Care at Scale
Are we ready for delivering obesity care at the scale necessary to have a meaningful effect on population health? Given the current situation with drug pricing and problems with health insurance, it is easy to think not. But at ObesityWeek in San Antonio, we see people who look past those barriers and find ways to get the care to people who need it.
They are simply getting down to the work at hand.
Delivering Obesity Care in Rural North Carolina
One striking view of how this can happen came from a symposium chaired by Deborah Horn, “The Obesity Care (R)Evolution.” Sarah Ro described impressive progress in delivering effective obesity care in a largely rural primary care network – the UNC Physicians Network in central North Carolina. She accepted the fundamental challenge we face in translating advances in clinical obesity science, saying:
“As an institution, how do we provide equitable access to obesity care for the masses?
“I am not willing to accept the status quo of obesity care for the few and wealthy.”
Her approach has been to integrate obesity medicine physicians into community-based primary care clinics and deliver cost-effective care despite severe limitations with health insurance, physician training, and personal challenges that patients face. Without depending entirely on newer, more expensive obesity medicines, this approach is yielding impressive, sustainable results with good follow-up care.
In sum, “a primary care model increases access to obesity care for all,” said Ro.
A Role for Telemedicine?
Other data presented at ObesityWeek suggests telehealth can address some of the gaps in access to obesity care. Researchers from Ro (no relation to Dr. Ro) and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center presented a summary of experience from a sample of more than 100,000 electronic health records of patients in the Ro digital health platform, which delivers access to obesity care. Their aim was to assess whether patients residing in rural or designated Primary Care Health Provider Shortage Areas (HPSAs) are seeking weight management care via telehealth.
Indeed, they are. Roughly 71% of patients participating in Ro health services come from either partial or whole-county HPSAs. It would seem that some part of what is fuelling the explosion in telehealth services is the need for care in areas with a shortage of healthcare providers.
Important Work
This is important work. The gap between the human need for obesity care and the current scale for delivering it huge. Both telehealth and integrating competent obesity care providers into primary care networks are promising approaches for closing that gap.
Click here for the presentation on obesity care in a primary care network and here for the research abstract on telemedicine. For further perspective, click here and here.
Sunrise in Roanoke Rapids, NC, photograph by Ted Kyle / ConscienHealth
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November 6, 2024
