Skip to main content

Lower Cost Concierge Medicine: Coming To Your City?

From the New York Times:  "Concierge Medical Care With a Smaller Price Tag."  Dr. Tom X. Lee, co-founder of Epocrates and now founder of One Medical Group, is "...bent on reversing what he calls 'bizarre habits that have been ingrained' in the world of primary care."

One Medical Group offers accessible, personalized care at substantially lower prices than other concierge-type practices, narrowing what Dr. Lee calls "...a growing chasm between the ideals of medicine and what’s actually practiced.”
"One Medical physicians say their jobs are like what they envisioned when they first went into the field — before they got their first job in a typical family practice, with its long waits and blizzards of paperwork."
The secrets?  None, really.  Just attention to fundamentals, judicious doses of creativity and (dare I say it?) some modern thinking about customer engagement.  A focus on hotel amenities and process efficiencies.  Automation and patient-friendly technologies - web sites, iPhones, self-scheduling.  Embracing e-mail communication with patients.  Offering same-day appointments.  Lower administrative overhead.  Acknowledging that sound medical care requires rapport and relationship-building.

Does it scale?  We'll find out later this year as Dr. Lee expands the model to a third large city.

More on concierge medicine; 

From Health Care Strategist blog: Trends in retail medicine.

From Kaiser Health News: "Doctors Abandon Traditional Practice For Concierge Medicine, Hospital Employment."

From Fierce Healthcare: "Concierge practices multiply as more docs drop Medicare."

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...
Post a Comment
Read more

gapingvoid cartoon #378

Buy your own, here.
Post a Comment
Read more

"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

...from the Veterans Health Administration and Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital. I know enough about my own strengths and weaknesses to know that I'm no IT expert. But I am acutely interested in examples of people and teams thinking differently to solve long-standing, intractable problems and, for better or worse, there are lots of those to be found in the IT realm. Yesterday, it was a story about a team adding iPhone portability to MEDITECH functionality, delivering to harried physicians better access to clinical data and more productive hours in every work day. (Wow. Apple in the boardroom AND the physician lounge. Has to be an IT traditionalist's worst nightmare. But I digress...) Today, the Wall Street Journal features a story about Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital finding an affordable, open-source alternative to proprietary EMR systems : "In the push to digitize America's hospitals, Midland Memorial faced an all-too-common dilemma: a crying need for information ...
3 comments
Read more