Primary Care Doctor Love

Instead of paying doctors to see more patients, let's pay them to see fewer but spend more time with them. The payoff is enormous. Better care, more satisfied patients, fewer medical malpractice lawsuits.

We can afford to pay doctors to spend more time with patients if we also ask them to treat appropriately. Base treatment on the clinical findings. This simple protocol will save hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare costs if applied universally.

Most of what we call "waste" in healthcare is simply a function of defensive medicine, patient demands, or greed. Eliminate these with a national medical care network of healthcare providers, doctors spending more time with patients, and careful examination of medical billing to assure appropriate care.

A good healthcare IT program can flag most inappropriate treatment. Care managers care discuss the care with the provider to assure that the care is appropriate or not. If not appropriate, the care provider must be warned that they risk being dropped from the healthcare network and won't be paid for treating outside the network.

It is time that care providers to back control of healthcare.

Let's Save Health Care in Three Easy Steps

Conceptually, saving US health care is not hard. All we need are three short steps.

1. Put all health care providers: doctors, surgeons, primary care, specialists, hospitals, clinics, chiropractors, test centers, shamans, witch doctors, and mental health professionals in a single, national, managed medical network. All patients see providers in this network.
2. Manage the care provided by the network to assure appropriate care using human and digital IT resources. Management is part of the medical community, not payers.
3. The network pays providers fairly and promptly and bills the insurers at cost with a small management fee.

Voila! When care provided is appropriate, the cost is rational. Only then should we consider cuts or limitations to care.

First, Save Health Care. Then Fix Everything Else.

Saving health care requires that we first address the root cause of the growing health care crisis - too much unnecessary medical treatment. Too many studies, tests, specialist referrals, etc. Without addressing over-treatment, we will never solve our health care problems.

The solution lies with helping Primary Care Physicians limit care to only that which is clearly supported by the clinical findings. Until we give them the support they need, out health care system will continue on its downward spiral.