| Recreating Personalized Family Medicine (By returning to what it once was) Increasingly patients are frustrated by hurried doctors with little time to listen. Perhaps you have questioned, “Does my doctor work for me, my insurance company, or the government?” It’s a concern many have when rushed through the modern healthcare system. In this new world of government regulations and insurance based payment rates, doctors often shorten appointment times to seven minutes or less. Your doctor is also disheartened by this trend toward a faster and more impersonal brand of medicine. Fortunately, a few doctors are doing something about it by offering their patients a family practice that charges an annual fee. This enables patients to obtain a higher quality of service, better access, more personalized care, and even house calls. Of course, the concept that the family doctor is the doctor that knows you and your family is not new. For much of the 20th century, most physicians were often integrated within a community and offered local, personalized service. These practices have become increasingly rare due to complex and costly regulations of medical practice by government and insurance companies and financial incentives for hospitals and health systems to offer assembly line medical care. Dr. Neighbors counts herself among the few physicians willing to go against the prevailing trend. She does not want someone else regulating what tests and medications she should order, or how long she should spend with each patient. In her practice, she sees all patients, whether in the office, the nursing home, the hospital, or at home – wherever care needs to be provided. Her patients don’t get passed off to walk-in clinics and assembly line hospital teams. Dr. Neighbors approach is to be the patient’s advocate in every context. Most primary care physicians have several thousand patients in their practice, and may see 35 -50 patients in their office. This means that they cannot devote very much time to any individual patient, forcing them to rely on others – nurses, urgent clinics, emergency rooms, and hospitalists – to provide much of their patients’ care. By contrast, Dr. Neighbors’ practice is limited to a fewer patients thereby allowing longer clinic visits and same-day appointments. “Seeing a relatively small number of patients each day lets me take the time necessary to research their medical issues and discuss their cases with other specialist,” Dr. Neighbors states. “I have time to attend medical training courses and read medical journals to stay up to date with constant changes in medicine. Fast medicine is incompatible with good medicine.” Dr. Neighbors feels privileged to know her patients so well. Her patients end up in the emergency room or require referral to a specialist physician less often. When they need care she is the doctor they call first. As she puts it, “I am able to provide true continuity of care, and this is probably the single most important contribution I make to my patients’ quality of life.” Dr. Neighbors sees patients in a wider variety of contexts, which makes her practice more complex. She remains available a greater number of hours than most other primary care doctors. To her, it is worth the extra time to provide the kind of care that she would want for herself or a close friend or relative. It’s the type of care she wishes for all patient and which would be if the Government had not limited the number of primary care doctors. Not coincidentally, a relatively high percentage of Dr. Neighbors’ patients are medical specialist and their families. Another prominent patient group in her practice is hospital nurses and administrators. Why are doctors and the people who run hospitals so over-represented in her practice? Presumably because they see the value in having a doctor devote the time and attention necessary to practice the best medicine. While Dr. Neighbors does provide Board Certified medical care based on the best that modern medicine has to offer, her style of practice is not cutting edge. In fact it is rather old school in the sense that most primary care physicians were once much closer to their patient’s lives. The underlying motivation is one of the oldest and soundest imaginable – physicians providing patients one-on-one individualized care. As Neighbors puts it, “Just imagine what kind of doctor you could have – and how rewarding it would be – if your doctor could be your doctor all the time, in every context, and you knew that no one else was preventing your doctor from doing the very best for you.” Tell Me More about Concierge Physicians in Huntsville, Alabama. Exit |