Continually Improving the Health and Value of Health Care for a Population of Patients

Today's primary care provider faces the challenge of caring for individual patients as well as caring for populations of patients. This article offers a model--the panel management process--for understanding and managing these activities and relationships. The model integrates some of the lessons learned during the past decade as we have worked to gain an understanding of the continual improvement of health care after we have understood that care as a process and system.