A message from Dr. Peter Kohler

The CHAMP Project is designed to test a new, computer-assisted healthcare team in primary care practice. While primary care remains rewarding, it faces an uncertain future from the burgeoning number of patients needing care from a proportionately smaller number of practitioners. When physicians must schedule patient visits every seven minutes, there is little time to properly manage multiple or complex problems. Access issues cause many patients, particularly the elderly and the poor, to seek medical care at the emergency room instead of the primary care clinic. This situation should not endure.

Medicine is one of the last areas of endeavor to fully utilize the potential for sophisticated software support. The CHAMP trial hopes to change that. The Project will test whether a healthcare team of Medical Assistants, Nurses, Nurse Practitioners, Physician Assistants and Physicians, using a sophisticated decision-analysis and documentation system, can each work to their maximum level of training and scope of practice. If they can, then many routine problems could be handled by team members other than the physician, thereby optimizing the physician’s time for the most complex patients. To this end, patient outcomes for this trial will be measured to compare the CHAMP team’s performance to that of conventional practice. The Project will determine if this model can increase capacity and achieve better medical outcomes at a lower cost.