NPR: Some primary care doctors remain in solo practice

In the first of a three-part series on primary care, NPR reports on doctors who choose to stay in solo practice.

"Conventional wisdom is that the age-old model of a single doctor serving patients out of a small office is rapidly going extinct. Doctors need to evolve or die. That means fancy new computerized medical systems and bigger groups to handle the overhead. But Cathy Crute wants to get one thing straight from the get-go: She is not a dinosaur." Crute practices in Portland, Maine, and formed her solo practice 10 years ago after years in group practice. "Since then, she's built a tight, efficient little team around her. So efficient, in fact, that Crute works only 3 1/2 days a week. … But what really keeps Crute up at night is what will happen to her practice — and her patients — when she retires. … So she's spending some of her time trying to recruit her replacement" (Rovner, 8/25).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.