Medicine is changing, and the old motto “politics as usual” is doing nothing good to give Americans confidence in not only their government, but their healthcare. Patients are finding themselves not only done with “Politics as usual,” but done with the entire healthcare field. Concierge medicine is a growing field for many reasons, one of which is a direct result of “politics as usual.”

It’s quite a dichotomy; the fact that politicians are fighting over this healthcare reform bill, wanting a change in medicine that will benefit every American, and yet pushing people away from healthcare all together. Patients aren’t covered by insurance companies as they once were, nor are they visiting their family physician as often. Today, solutions such as Take Care Clinics and neighborhood nurse practitioners with their own offices are seeing a rise in traffic.

The same old polticis in Washington is creating a detrimental trickle down affect on everyone here at home. As politicians lower doctor salaries through Medicare cuts and bicker back and forth about healthcare reform, Americans are just plain fed up. They’re fed up with politics, which, these days, includes healthcare. In the end, it’s the family physician who loses patients, money, and eventually their practice.

As students are scared away from practicing primary medicine, the physician shortage will only grow. And as we lose physicians, we will gain more nurse practitioners and clinics. These services already charge less, are more convenient, and offer same day services. The family physicians that actually remain practicing won’t be able to compete.

This is when concierge medicine, the market based solution for our current healthcare and financial situation, comes into play. In many hybrid cases, concierge practices take insurance and cash for services.

How else are family physicians expected to compete? When the patient wants a quick diagnosis, they head to the local pharmacy and sit down with the nurse practitioner. Healthcare is definitely changing, and so should physicians. Concierge doctors usually keep spa-like offices, offer personalized services, and are able to keep their doors open to their patients.

For more information on converting your practice to a concierge practice, visit http://www.SignatureMD.com today.

Dr. Chan sees changing healthcare field drastically affecting patient-doctor relationships

Phoenix, AZ February 23, 2010:  Dr. Kevin Chan, a practicing Phoenix physician, recently brought patients together to tell them things in his office were changing. Instead of hustling to see as many patients as possible a week, Dr. Chan had decided to add a new service (concierge medicine) that limits his practice to 600 patients, total. He called this new practice Rejenesis.

“The time has come for an alternate model of healthcare delivery in the 21st century,” Dr. Chan told his patients. “One that changes from the fast-paced, volume-based, assembly-line, impersonalized, and reactive conventional medicine to the time-devoting, quality-driven, patient-centered, individualized, and proactive functional physiologic medicine that focuses on prevention and wellness, addresses the whole person, body, mind and spirit, incorporates complementary and alternative medical therapies, and promotes optimal health far beyond the mere absence of illness.”

With the changing healthcare field, skyrocketing premiums and slow reimbursements patients and doctors alike are seeking market based solutions and alternatives. According to Dr. Chan, misdiagnosis and “symptom suppression” has saturated the medical industry.

“We will focus on the patterns of imbalances rather than the insurance code diagnoses,” Dr. Chan told patients. “We are used to naming the disease, blaming the disease, and then taming the disease with medications that you often take chronically. The reality is that these chronic diseases are often caused by hormone deficiencies, nutritional deficiencies, and toxin excesses. They are not simply caused by medication deficiencies.”

Dr. Chan, with the help of SignatureMD, added a new medical practice that is a bit more personal. Instead of trying to manage the care of 3,000+ patients, SignatureMD physicians focus their care and attention on 300 to 600 patients and improve their patients’ health and enjoyment of life.  By dedicating their attention to a smaller patient population, SignatureMD physicians are able to communicate on a regular basis with patients, something that is lacking with standard practice physicians.

Dr. Chan uses a personalized form of medicine called Functional Physiologic Medicine, which focuses on primary prevention and treatments designed to address underlying causes instead of symptom suppressions. Dr. Chan’s new practice allows for same day appointments, tightly coordinated care with specialists, his personal cell phone information, as well as treatment for visiting friends and family.

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SignatureMD offers patients comprehensive executive physicals, thorough preventative healthcare, same day appointments, on-time extended appointments, house calls, and after-hour availability. These services are normally not provided in standard primary care practices.  

For more information regarding concierge medicine, SignatureMD, or Dr. Kevin Chan, Rejenesis, please visit http://www.SignatureMD.com/chan  or email Dr. Chan at kchan@signaturemd.com. For interviews with Dr. Chan, one of Dr. Chan’s patients, or a SignatureMD doctor, please contact Dr. Chan or Matt Jacobson at matt.jacobson@signaturemd.com.

For some time now, we’ve been talking about the physician shortage that our country is currently plagued with, and concierge medicine might be the solution to this problem. If you think your appointment wait times are long now, just wait until a new healthcare reform bill goes into affect. With millions of newly insured Americans and less and less physicians to treat them, things will get pretty ugly out there.

According to the Wall Street Journal, America will find itself at a shortage of 125,000 primary care physicians over the next 15 years. This doesn’t bode well for the fact that we only graduate 27,000 new primary care physicians per year. The Wall Street Journal goes on to say that we already are short 16,000 physicians in 2010, and with the healthcare reform bill just around the corner, that could mean huge problems for the newly insured.

There are quite a few issues to this primary care physician crisis; one being the doctor’s yearly income, as speciailist make far more than primary care physicians, another being their schooling. The government actually runs a cap on the amount of residency positions available across the country, and that cap is limiting the amount of new physicians that can finish their schooling.

Well, this all may be about to change. While there still is a cap on residency positions available, more medical schools than ever before are opening or about to open. Not since the 1970’s has so many institutions promised to offer new medical schools, 23 to be exact.

Some schools, such as the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine, will aim to train doctors who will treat patients in more disadvantaged urban and rural areas, rather than in more well-to-do areas, reports the New York Times.  – FierceHealthCare.com

According to this HealthCare article, institutions around the nation are hoping to graduate 30% more medical students every year, which would greatly help that 125,000 physician deficit we will be facing in the next 15 years. With the new schools come new opportunities for students who in the past have chosen to study abroad. Now, they can  stay at home, learn the practice at home, and spend time with mentors at home.

Supporters of the expansion say that having more doctors will improve care, by getting doctors to urban and rural areas where they are needed, by shifting care to primary and family practice physicians rather than expensive specialists, and by reducing long waits for people to see a doctor and get the care they need. – NewYorkTimes.com

If you are tired of the long wati times and want a market based solution that give you the vip treatment, consider concierge medicine and http://www.SignatureMD.com.

SignatureMD Gives Patients Innovation, Better Care

The National Center for Policy Analysis Sees Concierge Medicine as the Affordable Answer

Santa Monica, CA, January 19, 2009:  SignatureMD’s innovative market-based healthcare service offering delivers “affordable and convenient” healthcare. The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) released a report January 19th that stated, “Physicians should be free to… create innovative practices that better meet the needs of patients.” SignatureMD goes beyond innovation with preventative care and a focus on wellness.

According to the NCPA, “They (concierge practices) all strive to make medical care more accessible and convenient to patients by rebundling and repricing medical services in ways that are not possible under third-party insurance.  The result is innovations that raise quality and improve patient care coordination says Devon Herrick, a Senior Fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).”

SignatureMD’s personalized healthcare offering not only delivers the highest quality preventative healthcare, but also brings back service and trust to healthcare. Instead of trying to manage the care of 3,000+ patients, SignatureMD physicians focus their care and attention on 300 to 600 patients and improve their patients’ health and enjoyment of life.  By dedicating their attention to a smaller patient population, SignatureMD physicians are able to communicate on a regular basis with patients, something that is lacking with standard practice physicians.

Patients perceive that this lack of communication results in lower quality care. For instance, according to a survey reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, more than two-thirds of the public (72%) think “insufficient time spent by doctors with patients is one cause of preventable medical errors,” and three-fourths (78%) think medical errors could be avoided if physicians spent more time with patients, according to the NCPA.

A focus on wellness, prevention, and communication is at the core of personalized medicine with SignatureMD. Statistics show that the average appointment wait time is over two weeks, while SignatureMD physicians provide on-time same-day service, as well as house calls. According to the NCPA, concierge practices such as those from SignatureMD offer convenient and affordable services for the uninsured, as well as supplementary care for the insured.

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SignatureMD offers patients comprehensive executive physicals, thorough preventative healthcare, same day appointments, on-time extended appointments, house calls, and after-hour availability. These services are normally not provided in standard primary care practices.  

For more information regarding concierge medicine, SignatureMD, or founder Matt Jacobson, please visit http://www.SignatureMD.com or email Matt at Matt.Jacobson@SignatureMD.com. For interviews with Matt Jacobson or a SignatureMD doctor, please contact Matt Jacobson.

Your health isn’t one-size-fits-all, and it shouldn’t have to be. Concierge medicine is not just about preventing illness, it’s about personalized healthcare that caters to you, the individual. The healthcare reform bill that is being tossed around is a sharp turn away from personalized medicine, directly into dark and disturbing territory.

The federal government’s push to control health costs through “comparative effectiveness” research could threaten advances in personalized medicine, in which treatments are individualized to each patient. – Forbes.com

Forbes talks about how a team of political men will be assembled to run studies and do research upon different treatments and procedures. In some cases, the treatments that do not perform well will no longer be allowed. The decision making that a concierge physician makes every day; the ones that are personalized to each individual patient, are at odds with the broad approach of healthcare reform.

“If there’s a blue pill and a red pill, and the blue pill is half the price of the red pill and works just as well, why not pay half price for the thing that’s going to make you well?” But patients and their ailments vary, so the choice is rarely that easy. –Forbes.com

Sure, doing the needed research to find out what, of the billions, treatments actually work and what are a waste of time and money. But, how do you even began to run that research when each individual patient has a different response to treatment, different allergies to drugs, different physiologies, and different side effects. There just isn’t a way to run a scientific study, with the needed homogenious study group, that represents the entirety of our American population. We are far too unique to be catagorized.

Hypothetically, the research group could find a treatment that saved your daughter’s life unnecessary because it didn’t produce results within the study. That is what many are worried about when it comes to healthcare reform. What works for some may not work for others.

It’s for this reason, and many others, that personalized medicine and concierge doctors and popping up all over the nation. Patients want individualized care; the kind of care that actually takes into account each person’s unique physiology and family history. This kind of healthcare checks your allergies and drug responses before prescribing you something that reacts with another drug.    

Perhaps this approach towards healthcare reform will save some money by eliminating certain procedures. But truly, in the long run when patients are needing extra care because certain treatments aren’t available anymore, it will cost us all a whole lot more. Not to mention the lack of innovation and invention of new and more effective drugs that will occur due to this healthcare reform bill.

For more information on how you can protect your healthcare, or how you can find a concierge doctor in your area, visit http://www.SignatureMD.com today.

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