Tired of waiting months for patients to receive a dermatology consult? Kaiser has a novel way to solve this. Enter the roving dermatologist, who takes consults over the cell phone and drives to the requesting physician’s office for an evaluation or biopsy:
The roving dermatologists can provide same-day assessments and biopsies of skin lesions, saving patients the month-long wait it can otherwise take to get an appointment with a dermatologist.
Although convenient, I can only see this working with dermatology. Don’t expect to see any roving cardiologists or surgeons anytime soon.
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{ 3 comments }
Especially for elderly patients, it’s a big deal to go to the doctor and have a family member take off work.
AMEN
The problem is the long waiting time to get into a dermatologist office. Especially for medical dermatology; cosmetic dermatology, they roll out the red carpet.
House calls, or in this case, roving office calls, is inherently less efficient because of travel. They see fewer patients per day.
I don’t see how this improves access to derm services, except for rural areas perhaps.
Dude…no driving involved. Visualize this: the Kaiser facilities are so big that the roving dermatologist is just walking around, not driving. You’ve got a large central medical office next to a hospital with 80-100 primary physicians, including ob and peds seeing patients at one time. The derm guy or gal just walks from room to room as needed. It’s pretty efficient – they can see as many patients as they would in an office day just walking around the building. The patient is already checked in and roomed – saves mucho time. Plus at my KP the derm guy often just tells the PCP what to write for and the PCP writes it and manages followup. Remember, it’s prepaid, so no billing tsuris. Also no preapproval for biopsies, so they can just go ahead and do them as needed as needed. You call derm on the phone, reach them directly, they tell you how many patients they’ve got ahead of you, they show up usually within 30 minutes and solve the problem. It’s also great because you never have to move possibly infectious rashes from the room. This is the sort of efficiency that only a very large prepaid HMO can achieve.
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