To the Editor:
I am writing to comment on the article by Hahn and Olson1 that appeared in the October issue of the Journal. I appreciate their look at the role of scheduled preventive visits and the accompanying costs in primary care. There is, however, another aspect of their data that deserves comment. Even for those patients coming only for acute care visits, this article shows that primary care physicians are successful in performing appropriate Papanicolaou tests 51% of the time, cholesterol panels 62% of the time, and mammograms 49% of the time. These data are important because they show once again the hidden value of primary care in the relatively successful coupling of preventive services with acute care visits. So, although there is certainly room for improvement in the provision of preventive services, the fact that it happens as well as it does when patients come in only for acute care visits is really a cause for remark and recognition.
—John W. Beasley, MD
University of Wisconsin Madison