High End Dental
I am always trolling for new stories and new ideas in the healthcare field. It is a hobby of mine. Here is another cool one that I recently discovered. A Florida dental practice has gone concierge with a greeter, a complementary glass of champagne or wine upon arrival, an iPad to play with and on and on. Dr. Patty’s Dental Boutique in Fort Lauderdale is a combination spa and dental practice. Though I am not loving the fact that botox injections seem to be performed by just about anybody nowadays, I still like that this person is thinking out of the box. The future of healthcare, if we break free from the insurance model, may just be in good customer service and it doesn’t have to cater to the rich. Dr. Patty wants to stand out so she has independent contractors in the office who provide massages, facials, peels, waxing and eyelash and permanent makeup treatments. Sure, there will be critics of her program but the bottom line is that she is an example of what it means to be a business owner. Physicians, in general, gave this power away to hospitals and administrators and now we are paying for it. That is another reason why we are in the position we are in today. In our world, there would be one committee, two action plans, three administrators, and partridge in a pear tree involved in allowing her to “pilot” the program. This would take a year before they even found the CEO (he was another another retreat) of the hospital to sign off on it. All of this would make her frustrated and she would give up or fail miserably because she would not be able to adjust on the fly as she learned new things.
Evidence again why I always recommend to anyone starting out in self-abusive industry, to work for someone else! Yes I admire the out-of-box innovation in the story, but as the first respondent noted, that sort of uppityness will not fly for doctors. Better to tell whatever group, hospital, corporation, or collectivist compassion mill that one will trade their time for cash, and leave the overhead, billing, and mental garbage for someone who gives a damn about such things. Time = $ : That’s the closest to “independent” doctors are going to see anymore.
I am surprised at your thoughts on this. The only way for healthcare to be save is for doctors to take it back and not work for idiot administrators. Only by bootstrapping and removing third parties will our independence and enjoyment be returned. When in doubt….choose freedom.
I’m having a worse and worse time contemplating what I’m told is “coming down the road pretty fast” that I’ll be paid based on my patient’s success at being healthy. Yesterday I saw two patients I’d not seen in a year, and they both said that they had been reading on the internet about what foods were good for diabetics, and that they didn’t consider ever taking pharmaceuticals. One even said, “the next time I take a pharmaceutical will be in my grave!” He’s a Friend of Dr. Whittaker supplements. The other had an infected toe last January in Florida, was on three antibiotics, and told to follow up with their primary care physician. Here he is May 1st, the toe still twice normal size and red “but the oozing is drying up from where the nail fell off.” They are both somewhat odd people, one a gym teacher who thinks his evaluation of his health is better than my poorly misguided attempts to prescribe poisons to him, and the other about the same, from the local news office. They are both a pain to treat, and will blame me for bad outcomes if their staying away and reading the internet gurus runs aground. How much is it going to pay me to try any more with them? Well, I got the gym teacher to take metformin again! Hard work. Do I get my money now? His HgbA1C was 8.6, so I guess it’s just all my fault.