Major Obamacare provisions aim to lower national health care costs by encouraging primary care and healthy living habits. The hope is that by having patients take advantage of preventative care provisions and communicating with their practitioners, Americans will live healthier lifestyles that do not require long-term, expensive care.

But Obamacare’s funding for community health clinics and prevention measures is not enough to realize the dream of a healthier America. The medical profession itself must change the way it does business, beginning with an increased focus on medical school training for family care and general practitioners.

According to a Kaiser Health News piece, elite schools tend to focus on producing highly-skilled and highly-specialized doctors at the expense of much-needed family doctors. New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine has responded to this growing need by starting a new Department of Family Medicine:

Students like Demetri Blanas, 26, who were interested in becoming family doctors found little support. For the first three years of school, his training focused almost exclusively on taking care of extremely ill patients in the hospital.

“I want to spend my career keeping people healthy rather than trying to bring them back from a very serious illness,” says Blanas. “I think it is what society needs right now, and that is important to me.”

Blanas says many of his professors discouraged him from going into primary care, telling him it was too much work, the pay was lousy, the job was boring, and it simply wasn’t as intellectually rigorous as being a specialist. [...] Yet he remained committed to pursuing family medicine. [...]

Dr. Dennis Charney, dean of the medical school, says that the new department represents a fundamental change in Mount Sinai’s mission. “It’s a big deal for our institution. We want to be one of the leading medical schools that educates the next generation of primary care doctors,” he says. And it comes not just because of the health overhaul law, but also because there is a growing interest among students in primary care, he added.

The fundamental role that primary care and family doctors will play in transitioning America from a system of “sick care” to “health care” is undeniable. But the country’s top schools must embrace the urgency of that reality by following Mount Sinai’s example, expanding their general and primary care departments, and encouraging talented young doctors like Blanas to devote their skills to non-specialized practices.

In a Medicare Advantage hearing before the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee on Friday, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) President Karen Ignagni confirmed that Obamacare is encouraging health care providers and private insurers to adjust their business models, just as the law was intended to do.

Although Ignagni noted that some of Obamacare’s provisions — such as its modifications to Medicare Advantage’s repayment structure — concern the insurance industry, she nonetheless acknowledged that the law has prompted health care providers, government agencies, and insurance companies to coordinate their care strategies while reexamining payment models:

REP. RON KIND (D-WI): Miss Ignagni, I know you and the plans that you represent in that, have been at the forefront when it comes to a lot of these changes and reforms. I think we need to be doing it on a parallel path between Medicare and the private plans out there. I don’t think doing it in isolation is going to work. Could you give us a quick update on what you’re seeing happening, especially in the private sector right now,with these types of delivery and payment reforms that are happening?

IGNAGNI: [...] There are very significant changes going on all across the country. [...] The story is about collaboration, health plans and clinicians collaborating inpatient-centered medical homes to bring more value to, and case management to, those with chronic illnesses, and taking those strategies into Medicare Advantage, Medicaid plans, SNIPS, and so on and so forth. [...] What is very significant now as a result of these strategies, health plans are showing in peer reviewed journal data that they’re working, with respect to re-admissions, emergency rooms, so we’re not finished by any means…but we have taken a major step and it clearly has to be the future, more coordinated care, more prospective payment, and partnerships between plans and clinicians and hospitals.

Watch it:

Coordinated case management is essential to providing patients with more efficient care. The more that hospitals, insurance providers, and clinicians cooperate and bundle their services and payments, the easier it becomes for American consumers to seek out flat-rate, quality care. As Ignagni mentions, there has been evidence in states such as Massachusetts that coordinated-care facilities treating dedicated patient pools for prospective, bundled fees (pre-determined flat rates) are accruing savings while maintaining high Medicare quality-metrics.