As mid-level providers are starting to take over primary care, can generalist doctors start doing specialist procedures?
If they’re smart, they’ll try. Better to take advantage of a specialist-favoring physician payment system, rather than wait for things to change.
Colonoscopies are among the more lucrative of procedures, and signs are pointing to a shortage of gastroenterologists in the coming years to perform them.
MedPage Today reports a study from the Annals of Family Medicine showing that primary care doctors can perform a colonoscopy “with the precision and safety advocated by gastroenterology organizations.”
Just as nurse practitioners and physicians assistants are capitalizing on the primary care shortage, those in generalist practice would be wise to take advantage of the shortage in specialty care.
The alternative, waiting for appropriate physician payment reform, remains uncertain as the specialty societies to do all they can to maintain the status quo.
Related posts:
- Why nurse practitioners and physician assistants will not solve the primary care shortage
- Should specialists be re-trained as primary care physicians?
- What role should nurse practitioners play in primary care?
- Medical students want to become primary care doctors, until reality hits
- Why primary care matters
- Does the AMA secretly want to kill primary care?
- Why primary care doctors shouldn’t be pain specialists
{ 8 comments }
When I was a resident doing a rural rotation, the internist started every morning with one or two screening colonscopies at the local hospital. $400 for an hour of work. Then back to the clinical grind.
It doesn’t get any easier than that.
Why not (as long as we pts can still have anesthesia)?
All kidding aside, I would feel more comfortable with my PCP doing a colonoscopy rather than a gastroenterologist I don’t know.
Colonoscopy by primary care doctors?
What, did they stop paying for colonoscopies or something?
No problem as long as you can deal with your own complications, which is why if I had to have a colonoscopy done, I’d go to a general surgeon and not a GI doc.
Two words: perforated colon
One word: malpractice
This is why gastroeneterologists need to really care about what happens to primary care doctors. There are big shots saying that primary care can be done by midlevels. Once that happens, they’re going to say, “Gee look at all the money we saved. Why don’t we train midlevels to do other things, such as colonoscopies?”
In other words, they’re going to come for you next.
A family practitioner
Anonymous at 9:21 -
Exactly!
How many of us FP’s wouldn’t love to spend the day doing scopes, lesion biopsies, stress tests, joint injections, etc. Things we were TRAINED TO DO but unable to continue once we were pushed onto the hamster wheel of 7-minute visits, prior authorizations and disability?
Watch how complacent we are when these “menial”tasks are outsourced to “cheaper providers.” We’ll be coming for you!
“No problem as long as you can deal with your own complications, which is why if I had to have a colonoscopy done, I’d go to a general surgeon and not a GI doc”
Funny how quickly the general surgeon will dump on the GI doc when they can’t treat the findings of the colonoscopy (besides routine CRC screening), which is I would prefer to have the GI doc perform the colonoscopy
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