CHARACTERISTIC | COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTRE | FEE-FOR-SERVICE PRACTICE* | REFORMED CAPITATION MODEL | ESTABLISHED CAPITATION MODEL |
---|---|---|---|---|
Physician remuneration | Salary | Fee for service | Blended | Capitation |
Patient rosters | No | No | Yes | Yes |
Group practice | Mandatory | Family health groups only† | Mandatory | Mandatory |
Access 24 hours a day, 7 days a week | Mandatory | Family health groups only† | Mandatory | Mandatory |
Funding for other allied primary care providers | Substantial | None | Some | Some |
↵* Fee-for-service practices include family health groups, which were newly formed at the time of the study.
↵† Late in 2004, the Ontario Ministry of Health created a new model of care, the family health group, to which fee-for-service practices could transition. A family health group is a collaborative comprehensive primary care delivery model involving 3 or more physicians practising together. These physicians need not be located in the same physical office space, but must be within reasonable distance of each other.13 Fee-for-service practices converted to this new model quickly, so that by early 2006 most fee-for-service practices had become family health groups, and it became evident that most would transition by the year’s end.
Data from Russell et al.14