It’s Monday morning. Your first three patients just came to you, and they all have something in common. One has diabetes and high blood pressure. The other has kidney problems. The third has heart disease and depression. You already know that none of them will be just a quick visit.
This is what chronic disease prevalence in primary care really looks like from the inside. These patients naturally need more time, more follow-up, and also more coordination than one visit can give. And the country is moving toward a shortage of doctors at the same time.
In this article, we’ll review all the numbers related to this and why they put so much pressure on medical practices. We’ll also see a few simple places to start.
What Counts as a Chronic Disease?
A chronic disease is a condition that lasts a year or more. It needs ongoing medical care, limits most daily activities, or both. That’s the definition the CDC uses for it, and it’s much wider than this.
Heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are its best-known examples. Together, chronic diseases are the leading cause of illness, disability, and death in the US. But the list doesn’t just stop there. Arthritis, asthma, chronic kidney disease, and depression can fit this as well.
How Common Is Chronic Disease in the US?
Let’s start with the chronic disease statistics US medical practices should absolutely know.
The Big Picture
Three in four American adults have at least one chronic condition. Over half of all adults have two or more. This comes from the CDC, and it’s a lot.
Just think of ten adults in your waiting room. It means about seven or eight of them have at least one long-term condition. Having a chronic condition is now this much normal for adults in the US. These are national numbers, so your own patient list may be a little different.
Who Is Affected
Older adults have the highest numbers here, but younger adults are in this as well:
- Adults 65 and older: more than 90% have at least one chronic condition
- Adults 35 to 64: more than 75%
- Adults 18 to 34: 60%
Most people think of adults 18 to 34 as the healthy group. Yet here, we see that more than half of them have at least one chronic condition too. Some groups are hit harder than others, mostly because of factors that make healthy choices harder.
What It Costs the Country
Chronic diseases are also leading drivers of the $5.3 trillion that Americans spend on health care every year. That number covers all health care and not just chronic care. But still, it helps show how big this problem really is.
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Why Chronic Disease Prevalence in Primary Care Strains Your Practice
Like most people, you might think of capacity as the number of open appointment slots only. But primary care capacity for chronic patients is much bigger. It’s how much quality time, attention, and follow-up your medical team can give to these people who need proper and steady care.
One Patient, Many Conditions
One person having three chronic conditions isn’t the same as three people with one condition each. Take a patient with diabetes, high blood pressure, and kidney disease. Each condition requires its own separate plan, and the plans have to fit together well. Also, each condition may also bring its own doctor, its own tests, and its own medicines. Medicines can interact too. Lab results connect a lot. This means one short visit rarely covers it all.
The Work No One Really Sees
Much chronic care happens when the patient isn’t really in the room. Your team is probably handling things like:
- Refill requests
- Lab results that need a call back
- Calls with specialists
- Check-ins with patients to see how they are doing
- Notes and documentation for all of the above
Just think of one patient with diabetes in one month. They might need a refill, a lab follow-up, a letter to the eye doctor, and even two check-in calls. That’s already five tasks for your team. Also, most of these tasks don’t happen in an exam room. This is why this work mostly doesn’t show up on the schedule. It’s very easy to miss how much time it all takes.
When the Schedule Fills Up
Complex patients need the most time from you, and so you don’t want to rush them. But every longer visit and every extra call takes time away from the same day. When these patients keep filling your schedule, there’s so much less room left for any new ones. Your medical assistants and nurses also get pulled between rooming patients and doing follow-ups. Over time, this can wear a full team down quietly.
The Doctor Shortage Makes It Harder
Until now, we only talked about patients and the work they bring. But the number of doctors matters a lot too. Your medical practice may be running very well today, but it helps to see the bigger picture for the whole country. So, here’s what experts expect in the next 10 years.
What the AAMC Expects by 2036
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) expects demand for physicians to grow faster than supply. It recently projected a shortage of 86,000 physicians by 2036. The main reasons for this are a continuously growing population, which is expected to grow by 8.4% by 2036, and an older population that needs much more care.
Even this number assumes that the country keeps adding medical residency positions. Without that, the shortage would be much larger naturally.
What That Means for Patients Who Need Regular Care
Fewer doctors put significantly more weight on primary care capacity for chronic patients. People already struggle too much to find new physicians, in primary care and in other specialties too. This thing is felt every day in the whole country, so if your medical practice seems quite stretched, just know that you’re certainly not alone in this.
Simple Ways You Can Start Easing the Load
You can’t really fix a national shortage from just your front desk. But now that you know about the US chronic disease statistics, you can look at your own patients and your own time much more closely.
Know Who Needs the Most Help
Start by finding your patients who have two or more chronic conditions. After all, you can’t plan for a group you haven’t really counted. Be it just a simple spreadsheet or an EHR report, they are enough to begin. When you can see where your complex patients are, you can start to see where your team’s time is going the most.
Look at Your Support Options
You don’t have to change everything at the same time. A few small steps can help you a lot:
- Set up a simple follow-up routine for your most complex patients
- Ask your medical assistants and nurses about which tasks they repeat most each week. They mostly know best where the time goes
- Look at whether some of that work could be done by a remote virtual support team
That last step is where our virtual chronic care management service comes in. At Care VMA Health, rigorously trained virtual medical assistants give your patients regular check-ins, medication reminders, and full care coordination. And they also keep you completely updated.
For your patients, this means that a professional stays in touch with them between visits. Meanwhile, your in-house team now stays more focused on the patients that are in the room.
Frequently Asked Questions
What causes most chronic diseases?
According to the CDC, most such diseases come from a short list of risk factors like smoking, poor nutrition, not enough physical activity, and too much alcohol. Where a person lives matters as well. Some communities have very few safe places to be active or few stores that sell fresh fruits and vegetables. This makes healthy choices harder.
Do people in rural areas have a harder time getting care?
In some rural areas, yes. Doctor shortages, hospital closures, and long distances can actually get in the way. That can make it very hard for patients to get preventive screenings or specialist follow-up care.
What is chronic care management?
Chronic care management, or CCM, is a Medicare program for patients with two or more chronic conditions. These conditions are expected to last at least 12 months or until the end of life, and they put the patient at significant amount of risk. It pays for care that occurs outside the office visit. You can read our guide on what chronic care management is in detail.
Final Words
Chronic disease prevalence in primary care is already shaping your schedule, your team’s workload, and how easily new patients can get in a lot. The doctor shortage won’t solve itself quickly, either.
But you don’t really need any perfect plan to begin making this thing better. Just count your complex patients. Look at where your team’s time currently goes. And take one small step. Starting small is still starting, after all.
