§299b–4 Research supporting primary care and access in underserved areas

Summary

Creates an independent Preventive Services Task Force made up of experts. The Task Force must look at scientific evidence about clinical preventive services and write recommendations for anyone who provides or helps shape health care. Those recommendations go into a guide for doctors, health systems, public health agencies, employers, Congress, and others. The Task Force must consider advice from several federal agencies and medical groups (for example, AHRQ, NIH, CDC, the Institute of Medicine, specialty medical associations, patient groups, and scientific societies). Its duties include adding new topics and recommendations (including for specific groups and ages); reviewing and updating existing recommendations at least once every 5 years; linking its work with federal health goals; spreading recommendations more widely; helping organizations that ask for technical support to use the Guide; and sending yearly reports to Congress and related agencies that point out research gaps and priority areas, including people and age groups not well covered now. The Agency must give ongoing administrative, research, and technical help and must help share the recommendations. The Task Force must coordinate with the Community Preventive Services Task Force and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to see how clinic and community advice fit together. The Task Force is not subject to chapter 10 of title 5. Members and their recommendations must be independent and, when possible, free from political pressure. Money may be appropriated as needed each fiscal year to run the Task Force. Also creates a Center for Primary Care Research inside the Agency. The Center will be the main source of federal funding for research about primary care. Primary care research covers first contact for health issues, diagnosis, treatment or referral to specialists, preventive care, and the clinician–patient relationship in the family and community. The Center must do and support research on what primary care looks like, how common clinical problems are managed, how undifferentiated problems are handled, and how health services stay continuous and coordinated.