By AUBREY WHELAN | THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
PHILADELPHIA — As a primary care physician at Jefferson Health, Greg Jaffe helps his patients navigate diabetes and high blood pressure, flu shots and annual checkups — standard fare for a family medicine practitioner. But for many of his patients, he also oversees a type of care that most of his colleagues in primary care won’t take on: addiction treatment.
Jaffe had no intention of treating patients for addiction when he became a doctor. But in 2021, he began running a small, once-a-week clinic at Jefferson that prescribed patients buprenorphine, an opioid-based addiction medication. After patients are stabilized at the clinic, they are transferred to primary care physicians — including Jaffe — making their long-term addiction treatment more convenient.
Jaffe’s new slate of patients has opened his eyes to the benefits of providing addiction medicine along with primary care, as a kind of one-stop shop for patients who often face significant barriers to getting any kind of health care.
New research backs up this idea. Primary care physicians who care for people with addiction can prevent more people from dying of an overdose, according to a new study from the University of Pittsburgh.