In This Issue: Continuity, Relationships, and the Illusion of a Steady State

This issue of Annals, the last I will be introducing as Editor, is about relationships. A study of more than one million Medicare patients seen by 6,551 primary care physicians finds that multiple measures of continuity of care are associated with lower health care expenditure and hospitalization rates.1 An editorial describes continuity as presence, trust, reliability, responsibility, and endurance, and decries its diminishment.