Earlier this year, the Primary Care Development Corporation (PCDC) released the New York State Primary Care Scorecard to bring together available data on primary care across four domains: workforce, access, performance, and health outcomes. This scorecard shows both the strength of and the gaps in health care data to inform policy decisions. In New York, the Statewide Health Information Network for New York (SHIN-NY), and the All-Payer Database (APD) are central to the state’s health data and information infrastructure. Today, the lack of publicly available expenditure data undermines the ability of policymakers and other stakeholders to understand the proportion of healthcare spending going to primary care. Making these data available will support policy and program analysis and help identify gaps in care.

PCDC’s Primary Care Summit aimed to make recommendations and identify best practices in using publicly accessible healthcare data to determine programmatic and policy priorities that would help increase access to primary care for all New Yorkers, measure the impact and progress of those changes, and identify areas of need.

The Summit explored the following issues:

• Recommendations to democratize data in New York so there is transparency and accountability. What are the barriers to making primary care data in the APD and the SHIN-NY publicly available in New York?
• Priorities for utilizing health care data to drive policy change in New York: what are the best statutory/regulatory practices for collecting, managing, and publicly sharing these data?
• What can New York learn from other states and their health data systems?

This year, the program included two panels with state and national experts. The first panel, focused on New York, featured:

• David Horrocks, CEO, New York eHealth Collaborative
• Oxiris Barbot, M.D., President & CEO of United Hospital Fund
• Anne Schettine, RN, Director of the Office of Health Services Quality and Analytics, New York State Department of Health

The second panel, discussing the national context, included:

• Kevin McAvey, Managing Director, Manatt Health
• Erin Bonney, Director of Health Informatics and Reporting, Center for Health Information and Analysis (CHIA)
• Susan Beane, M.D., Vice President and Executive Medical Director, Healthfirst

The Summit concluded with a closing conversation between Louise Cohen, CEO of PCDC, and Sherry Glied, PhD, Dean of the Wagner School of Public Service at NYU.