A few months ago we highlighted this TV news story. We mentioned that DPC is the only way to fix this:
Well, I have one and it is called Direct Primary Care. It’s something the experts never talk about because it would put them out of a job. They couldn’t give lectures on resilience, yoga retreats, burnout, new metrics, and on and on.
Why?
Because DPC gives doctors control over their TIME. This is something the system cannot do. It fixes most of the problems primary care docs have. Would it help the doctor shortage? No. That’s complicated. How about adding more medical schools and residencies? How about promoting DPC more so that medical students CHOOSE primary residencies? That’s a start.
Now a new article came out in the Providence Journal called:
It basically makes the same points as the first piece linked above but this time they take their digs at the membership model:
Dr. Thomas Bledsoe, who also teaches at Brown and serves as president of the Rhode Island Medical Society, describes the work of a primary care provider as nonstop.
“Seeing a patient every 15 or 20 minutes, or every 30 minutes through the course of the day, and then the test results come back and the phone calls come in … the number of patient touches per day and the number of administrative tasks per day, I think, is higher than a lot of other types of medical practice,” Bledsoe said. “And that and that gets tiring, frankly, after a while.”
Some providers have decided they’ve had enough, while some doctors who’ve remained in the field have been offering so-called concierge medicine for those who can pay a steep flat fee, sometimes a few thousand dollars
Typically those providers don’t deal with insurers, see fewer patients and offer them far more attention.
“They might have the doctor’s cellphone,” Gardner said. “They have access in a way that sort of a standard practice wouldn’t offer. And the issue with this is that it’s really nice for the docs and the practice and for their patients, because they’re sort of practicing medicine the way they probably imagined doing it, but … it ends up being a very highly [selective] group.”
Those without the means for concierge care are then thrown back into the already massive pool of patients searching for primary-care doctors.
Once again the media, the ivory tower doctors, and journalist Amy Russo get it confused. Concierge medicine does cost a lot and bills insurance. They don’t mention Direct Primary Care because maybe they don’t know about it. DPC doesn’t cost thousands and saves patients tons on labs, office visit fees, etc. And we don’t bill insurance.
It would have been nice if interviewed Dr. Wendy Regan at Harbour Direct Primary Care and see how she practices medicine. We highlighted her here. The bottom line is that primary care is dead because corporate medicine is grinding docs to dust or just replacing them. And they don’t care. Direct Primary Care is our only hope of continuing to help patients in the way they deserve. It is also the only hope for patients who want to be seen in an appropriate manner.