Category: Direct Care
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Challenging the Status Quo: A Dermatologist’s Direct Care Vision
The Direct Care Derm Journey: Transforming Healthcare Understanding Direct Care Direct care is about restoring the vital physician-patient relationship. It’s a model that subtracts unnecessary intermediaries, focusing on transparent, affordable, and superior care. This approach counters the frustrations of indirect care where insurance companies often hinder necessary medical treatments. Direct care is an antidote to…
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How Big Health Insurance Distorted and Destroyed a Good Product
What is insurance? Insurance is a tool for protection against financial loss. It’s not a tool that should be used to pay for relatively small things that happen frequently, as we tend to do with health insurance. For me, it’s all about mitigating the risk posed by occurrences that would, without insurance, create significant financial…
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Big Box Medical Fails to Match Patients with Their Ideal Doctors (and Vice Versa)
A profound lack of choice within Big Box Medical creates a matching problem that leads to dissatisfaction and disillusionment on both sides of the equation. Patients typically don’t get much choice over what doctor they see, especially if they want to in their medical insurer’s “network” to make the service at least remotely affordable. Doctors,…
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How Much Does This Cost?
When you’re a consumer, “How much does this cost?” should be a simple question with a simple answer. Inside Big Box Medicine, however, it rarely is. Why? Come on. They don’t want you to see those prices. And, who cares, right? Your health insurance will take care of it! Ha… I’m showing a bill from…
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Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Tech, Big Pharma… Big Healthcare?
New York Times Headline: “Doctors Unionize at Big Health Care System” I love that the Times chose to refer to Allina Health as “Big Health Care System”. Doest that remind you of anything? Intentional or not, for me it brings to mind other notorious BIGs: Big OilBig TobaccoBig TechBig PharmaBiggie Smalls (j/k) There are plenty of perks to being…
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Functional Medicine As Systems Medicine
Per the The Institute for Functional Medicine: “Functional medicine is a systems biology–based approach that focuses on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease. Each symptom or differential diagnosis may be one of many contributing to an individual’s illness. A diagnosis can be the result of more than one cause. For example, depression can be…
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We Can Think And Do Different In Healthcare
My daughter and I spent some time with this bee at the park yesterday. This is how we look and feel when we’re immersed in deep, meaningful, significant work. Or just having a great time. Or both, which is more attainable than many of my fellow physicians may think. It can and should be messy,…
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Direct Care: Remove The Middle Man When He’s Not Contributing
Direct care (doctor provides value; patient/consumer pays doctor directly in return for that value) removes the middle man when he is not adding value. I know this image doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s just a doodle. But it’s hard to argue with the core of it. Like automobile insurance (required by law in the…
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The Direct Care Patient Mindset
Ever since my friend Tea Nguyen, DPM shared this post on LinkedIn, I’ve been chewing on the idea of the direct care patient mindset. For context, I recommend you read it before continuing. It brings me joy to know that Dr. Nguyen, instead of leaving medicine due to her frustrations with the system, found a sustainable way…
