National Nurses Week is upon us! Officially going from Saturday, May 6 to Friday, May 12, 2023, with the 2023 theme being “Nurses Make a Difference: Anytime, Anywhere – Always”. According to the American Nurses Association, there are currently over 4 million Registered Nurses in America. 

With the public health emergency and the impact of Covid on the overall workforce, we’ve all become even more familiar with terms such as “The Great Resignation” and “toxic culture”. Especially in the overburdened healthcare industry, with many clinical and support areas experiencing shortages of employees or shifts in employee responsibilities, the topic of workplace culture has become even more critical.

Medicare Annual Wellness Visits (AWV) are frequently viewed by primary care providers as a tedious visit in which patients see little value. With consistent access to care issues and a shortage of primary care providers, these visits are easy to push to the side and focus on other visits. The problem is, these visits can impact attribution and they are also a key metric in value-based care plans as well as Accountable Care Organization (ACO) requirements to receive incentive payments. So how can a practice balance the need to maintain attribution and satisfy insurance requirements while still providing crucial hands-on care to patients? The answer may be more simple than hiring more providers or limiting new patients. Nurse-led Annual Wellness Visit programs have been proven to effectively meet the AWV requirements while increasing access to the provider for other visits.