direct primary care

See the following -

A New Kind of Doctor's Office Charges a Monthly Fee and Doesn't Take Insurance — and It Could Be the Future of Medicine

Lydia Ramsey | Business Insider | March 19, 2017

Dr. Bryan Hill spent his career working as a pediatrician, teaching at a university, and working at a hospital. But in March 2016, he decided he no longer wanted a boss. He took some time off, then one day he got a call asking if he'd be up for doing a house call for a woman whose son was sick. He agreed, and by the end of that visit, he realized he wanted to treat patients without dealing with any of the insurance requirements. Then he learned about a totally different way to run a doctor's office...

Read More »

Colorado’s Direct Primary Care Bill: A Better Way to Pay for Healthcare?

Kelsey Ray | The Colorado Independent | April 10, 2017

Coloradans frustrated with the high costs of primary healthcare, take heed: A bill to protect a lower-cost model heads today to the state House floor after passing committee in both chambers. Fed up with the administrative burdens of “fee-for-service” insurance billing, family doctors across the country increasingly are turning to a payment model called direct primary care, in which patients and their primary care physicians enter into payment agreements that eliminate the middleman of traditional insurance...

Read More »

Health Orgs Dooming Their "Innovation" To Failure

Dave Chase | Forbes | June 15, 2013

Healthcare organizations are rapidly trying to reinvent themselves in light of the new rules of the game. One could argue it officially started October 1, 2012 with Medicare’s readmission penalties. People are calling this the “no outcome, no income” era. [...] Read More »

The New (Old) Family Doctor: Cheaper, Better Care Without Insurance

DailyFinance | Bruce Watson | June 7, 2013

For a growing number of doctors who are trying to recapture the simplicity -- and profitability -- of old fashioned family medicine, the solution seems to lie in taking out one ingredient: insurance companies. Read More »

What Are We Prepared to Do in the United States to Save Primary Care?

I propose two significant changes to help make primary care relevant in the 21st century...I wrote a longer piece on [Virtual Care] earlier in the year. In short, it's a disgrace that we've put so many hurdles on telemedicine, and that it continues to be so underused. It is widely available in health plans, but rarely practiced by physicians nor by patients. Instead, we still mostly go to our doctors offices, to ERs, or perhaps now to drugstores.A televisit should be the first course of action for non-emergencies. We must remove regulatory and reimbursement barriers, and incent patients to take advantage of the speed and convenience of the option. Moreover, as AI options for diagnoses and advice quickly become more viable, we can use them to triage our needs, help assure continuity with physicians, and eventually reduce the need to talk to a human...

Read More »

When Artificial Intelligence Robots Start Replacing Physicians, Will We Notice -- Or Care?

There's an interesting verbal battle going on between two prominent tech venture capitalists over the future of AI in health care.  In an interview in Vox,  Marc Andreessen asserted that Vinod Khosla "has written all these stories about how doctors are going to go away...And I think he is completely wrong."  Mr. Khosla was quick to respond via Twitter:  "Maybe @pmarca [Mr. Andreessen] should read what I think before assuming what I said about doctors going away." He included a link to his detailed "speculations and musings" on the topic. It turns out that Mr. Khosla believes that AI will take away 80% of physicians' work, but not necessarily 80% of their jobs, leaving them more time to focus on the "human aspects of medical practice such as empathy and ethical choices"...