The Specialty Care Access Problem, and the Case for Autonomy | Dr. Edmund Pribitkin
Access to specialty care is one of the most stubborn problems in American healthcare. One in three people face barriers to getting it. The causes stack on top of each other: cost, geography, administrative red tape, and the fragmentation that hits older patients with complex needs the hardest. In this launch episode of Healthcare Autonomy, Dr. David Nace, Chief Medical Officer at Innovaccer, opens the show with a guest who has spent his career inside these questions: Dr. Edmund Pribitkin, EVP and Chief Physician Executive at Jefferson Health, with more than 30 years of academic leadership and oversight of $1.6 billion in physician care services. The conversation works through the barriers one by one, then turns toward solutions: virtual visits and consults, engaging patients between appointments, measuring outcomes that actually matter rather than proxies, and the movement from fee-for-service toward value-based, population-level care. Running underneath it all is the idea that gives the show its name. Patients want more autonomy. Physicians want more autonomy. Health systems want more autonomy. The question this series sets out to explore is whether technology can help deliver it.
