Is email doomed to concierge practices only? Seems that way:
Some health plans have begun reimbursing doctors who interact with patients on specially created Web sites, but the numbers are still negligible. For the most part, doctors are not paid unless they see patients face to face.In their offices, doctors are under constant pressure to curtail time spent with patients, said Marcy Zwelling-Aamot, an internist with a private practice and former president of the Los Angeles County Medical Association. The last thing most of them want is to give patients another way to get a hold of them.
“They don’t want to be bombarded,” said Zwelling-Aamot, who runs a concierge practice, meaning she doesn’t take insurance. Her patients pay her $1,500 a year for full access to her services, including e-mail consultation.
But “I have 500 patients,” she said. Other doctors may “have 3,000 patients.”
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I used to be employed (read: salaried) by a large group practice that was run by docs that hadn’t seen patients since the stone age. They loved this crap! Patients like it and want it and it breeds loyalty, blah blah blah. The only catch for us overworked docs? Some insurances reimbursed for the Relay Health consults, but the company got the money! The doc who was expected to respond to 20-30 emails a day was getting paid NADA for the 2-3 hours of personal time they were expected to use to respond to the emails! So now we were working 60-70 hours per week in the office and only getting paid for 40 and they were expecting us to work for free during our personal time.
Unless the doc gets some compensation for emails, in the setting of group practices, this will not catch on. People need to realize docs are people too and we have personal lives.
Sure, I’ll respond to all my patient’s e-mails; just as soon as lawyers waive their hourly fee for this service and do the same.
As Karl Marx observed in the Communist Manifesto, physcians, lawyers, artisans and other professionals are NOT among the Bourgios class. They are working class individuals who earn only as much as they personally produce; their business can only bill (legally) for work produced or personally directed by them. Quite simply, time is money. A physician acting as a physician, or a lawyer acting as a lawyer cannot co-opt the fruit fellow physicians or lawyers. Only if they change hats and become a business cheiftan can they control the means of production and get a cut of the professionals labor.
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