In the U.S., 21.8% of adults receive behavioral health treatment annually. In 2024, Medicare began allowing physicians to bill Medicare for certified peer-support specialists through the introduction of principal illness navigation peer-support (PIN-PS) reimbursement codes. An interview study with 20 participants, including physicians, certified peer support specialists and leaders, policy professionals, payer representatives, and behavioral health organization leaders, examined barriers and facilitators to PIN-PS adoption.

Medicaid patients have mounting care needs, poorly managed chronic conditions and often socioeconomic barriers that keep them from preventive care. The ambulatory care department at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, a safety-net hospital serving an under-resourced, heavily Medicaid population in Queens, New York, introduced a new care delivery model to reach these patients earlier.

Pharmacies that receive federal funds must provide language support to make sure patients can understand their medication instructions. A survey of 169 outpatient prescribers at a large academic medical center found widespread uncertainty about how language support actually works.

Between 2023 and 2025, CO-OP leaders and staff made 36 “Learning Tours” visits, reaching 82 primary care sites and more than 300 clinicians, medical directors and staff across northern New England and bordering states.

More than one in five U.S. adults lives with chronic pain, which isolation and stigma can worsen. Group medical visits allow multiple patients with a common condition to receive care alongside health education and peer support. This study examined how group medical visits facilitate four types of social support: emotional, appraisal, informational, and instrumental.

Phosphatidylethanol (PEth) is a blood alcohol biomarker that can provide an alternative approach to identifying hazardous alcohol use in primary care by reflecting alcohol consumption over preceding weeks. Researchers in Sweden used health record data from 2013 to 2023 to examine the alignment between patients’ two self-reported measures of alcohol use and PEth tests.

A study comparing 22,632 teamlet patients with at least one chronic condition against 163,055 similar patients who received usual care from 2014 to 2021 found that the teamlet model was associated with decreased overall health care costs for people with chronic disease over six years.

Annals of Family Medicine New Research, September/October 2026 Issue

There is no standard curriculum or metric for evaluating success of family residency quality improvement (QI) projects. A survey of 321 U.S. family medicine residency program directors asked how programs teach QI and who supervises projects. The survey also asked whether residents can get to clinic data, how projects are organized, and what the projects achieve.