The key to good medical care is time; specifically facetime between the patient and physician. There is no substitute for this.
Before insurance got involved with care, the volume of patients that a doctor would see was much less, as they spent a lot longer with each patients.
We don’t try to spend extra time just for the sake of it, we do this because we feel it is necessary to provide quality of care.
Hour visits are now almost unheard of.
Looking at the specialties, it is not uncommon to double book 15 minute visits all day.
Half of those very short visits are allotted for charting.
What you are left with is around 7 minutes of face-time with the physician.
Looking at the specialties, it is not uncommon to double book 15 minute visits all day. 1/2 of those very short visits are allotted for charting. What u r left with is around 7 minutes of face-time w/the physician. Click To Tweet
You may be the best physician in the world at what you do, but doing a good job in 7 minutes is hard.
These visits are built for patients who are good historians, already educated about their medical issue, and have only one problem.
Only a minority of patients fit into the above mentioned boxes. What that means is that for most, the care is substandard, even if the physician is world class.
So why don’t physicians just make their visits longer? Because they can’t without going bankrupt.
Insurance has made overhead so high and reimbursements low such that only high volume models will survive (albeit they are struggling as well).
The solution is to remove insurance from the situation so we can get back to longer visits and higher quality medical care.
