Right-Site Care Programme with a Community-based Family Medicine Clinic in Singapore: Secondary Data Analysis of Its Impact on Mortality and Healthcare Utilisation

Objective: Stable patients with chronic conditions could be appropriately cared for at family medicine clinics (FMC) and discharged from hospital specialist outpatient clinics (SOCs). The Right-Site Care Programme with Frontier FMC emphasised care organised around patients in community rather than hospital-based providers, with one identifiable primary provider. This study evaluated impact of this programme on mortality and healthcare utilisation.

Design: A retrospective study without randomisation using secondary data analysis of patients enrolled in the intervention matched 1:1 with unenrolled patients as controls.

Setting: Programme was supported by the Ministry of Health in Singapore, a city-state nation in Southeast Asia with 5.6 million population.

Participants: Intervention group comprises patients enrolled from January to December 2014 (n=684) and control patients (n=684) with at least one SOC and no FMC attendance during same period.

Interventions: Family physician in Frontier FMC managed patients in consultation with relevant specialist physicians or fully managed patients independently. Care teams in SOCs and FMC used a common electronic medical records system to facilitate care coordination and conducted regular multidisciplinary case conferences.

Primary Outcome Measures: Deidentified linked healthcare administrative data for time period of January 2011 to December 2017 were extracted. Three-year postenrolment mortality rates and utilisation frequencies and charges for SOC, public primary care centres (polyclinic), emergency department attendances and emergency, non-day surgery inpatient and all-cause admissions were compared.

Results: Intervention patients had lower mortality rate (HR=0.37, p<0.01). Among those with potential of postenrolment polyclinic attendance, intervention patients had lower frequencies (incidence rate ratio (IRR)=0.60, p<0.01) and charges (mean ratio (MR)=0.51, p<0.01). Among those with potential of postenrolment SOC attendance, intervention patients had higher frequencies (IRR=2.06, p<0.01) and charges (MR=1.86, p<0.01).

Conclusions: Intervention patients had better survival, probably because their chronic conditions were better managed with close monitoring, contributing to higher total outpatient attendance frequencies and charges.