Running medicine as a small business

Some docs just get it. Medicine is simply a customer-service business:

It is not just a matter of moving to a small town. Ms. Kissell’s doctor, Melissa Gerdes, is one of a rapidly growing number of physicians who have streamlined their schedules and added Internet services, among other steps, to better meet the needs of patients. For physicians like Dr. Gerdes, it is simply good business.
Those doctors know that as walk-in medical offices and retail-store clinics pose new competition, and as shrinking insurance benefits mean patients are paying more of their own bills, family care medicine is more than ever a consumer-service business. And it pays to keep the customer satisfied.

Comments

Josh
Can i get an AMEN! How can we look at the success of retail clinics and still not get it?!? We are in the business of medicine and we need to compete and adapt just like every other industry. And when we do, its the pts who’ll win
Anonymous
If it’s a business and we’re all competing with each other then let’s make the “customer” pay for his own care. No payment, no care given. Maybe this would work in the outpatient world but I doubt it.
In the hospital, we don’t refuse to take care of pateints who can’t pay. I know several docs in my area who take outpatients without asking about reimbursment as well (and I know there are such kind doctors all over the US).
If it’s a business, everyone should have cash-only practices that cater to the whims of the customers.
Sounds like the development of a 2 tiered system – except that I’m a doctor and I couldn’t afford a to be a paient in a concierge practice.
Anonymous
Wait a minute here. I thought the USA had a huge doctor shortage.
Apparently those are all BS lies, if doctors are having to actively compete against each other for patients
Anonymous
“Apparently those are all BS lies, if doctors are having to actively compete against each other for patients”
Lies or no lies, shortage or no shortage, all they are doing is competing for those able and willing to pay properly for service. That isn’t everyone or for that matter most people who are consuming services.
Big difference there.
Josh
Hey Anyonymous, you’re absolutely right: all practices should be cash-only. The third-party-payer system has never worked, if it did you’d see it at the gas pump. The fact is that the free market has led to cheaper & better products in every other industry execpt medicine b/c we choose to bury our head in the sand about economics. If people paid the true cost of their healthcare, they’d be better consumers and would use their market power to lower prices.
Now i know what your saying, this will never work etc etc. I disagree, over at my blog, freemarketdoctors, i outline how an FP could charge $20/15 min visit still make 200k/yr.
Anonymous
The third-party-payer system has never worked, if it did you’d see it at the gas pump.
I think this statement ignores the reason that insurance plans were created in the first place – at least in the US. Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans were created by physicians in the 1920′s and 30′s to make certain that physicians would be paid.
In that they succeeded admirably.
Pity doctors no longer control them.

Running medicine as a small business

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