In the mid 1970’s Dr. George Engel pioneered the biopsychosocial model of medicine. The model is pretty self-explanatory, yet I used to get lectures about it as a child while I was trying to eat Honey Nut Cheerios and watch Spider-Man. You see, my father trained under Dr. Engle at the University of Rochester and has practiced behavioral neurology since that time. So as in a scene from A River Runs Through It, I learned about Dr. Engel’s gospel at an early age.

I am haunted by the report that our federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is considering handicapping metrics for physicians who work in difficult psychosocial communities.

Only a federal bureaucrat would commission a study to validate Dr. Engel’s four-decade-old work. A lay reader of Wikipedia can easily understand the impact upon HHS or Medicare biomedical metrics for physicians who choose to serve challenging psychosocial communities. Yet the New England Journal of Medicine and Harvard School of Public Health weigh in suggesting we need further study and more metrics with increasing fudge factors.

There is no need to complicate the debate over our nation’s healthcare crisis with more noisy commentary.  These proposed and increasingly complicated metrics will require employed non-clinical PhD or MPHs to decipher. Buried in the middle of the NEJM text is the only significant statement in the entire piece, “we need to make strides in addressing the underlying issues themselves.”

Caring for a diabetic in Detroit is very different than Grosse Point. The biology is the same, however the psychosocial challenges are completely different. As a medical student I was quite fortunate to have a Henry Ford Hospital primary care continuity clinic in Detroit. My patients had psychosocial challenges a kid from the Brahmin Boston suburbs could never imagine. For example, residents of Grosse Point or Hingham do not contract syphilis when their spouse comes home from prison. Nor do they have transportation barriers in seeing their physician or diabetes nurse.

Rather than HHS further complicating their already arcane metrics with fudge factors for physicians in challenging communities (requiring data wonks to interpret), why not keep it simple and address the whole patient?  We need to provide support for psychosocial barriers to health. This would take money away from healthcare programs that folks in Hingham and Gross Point enjoy but there is no need to further disenfranchise those Americans who are already struggling.

Our Veterans Healthcare Administration remains the most enlightened healthcare system I have seen regarding Dr. Engel’s model.   By imbedding psychologists and social workers within primary care clinics, those PCPs can provide warm hand-offs to qualified professionals to break psychosocial barriers to a veteran’s health. This is a model that should be duplicated elsewhere in the public and private sectors as it improves access and reduces downstream costs of chronic diseases such as smoking, substance abuse,  diabetes, and obesity.  Unfortunately, it appears that HHS, NEJM, and Harvard are moving in a different direction.