Uber Visits?

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Here’s what is clear: Seeing several patients at once can be good for harried doctors’ finances.

As the concept of industrialized medicine gains more traction it has led to other “brilliant” ideas to treat more and more people like cattle.  Here is one that is trending: group visits.  Yes, just like shared car rides you now can share your medical visit. Insane?  Of course it is!  This is not what healthcare is about.  It should be authentic. It should be personal.  Mrs. Jones shouldn’t be talking about her vaginal itching in front of 6 other people. Mr. Smith shouldn’t be talking about his suicidal tendencies in front of an audience. 

“It’s efficient. It’s economical. It’s high-quality care when it’s done right,” says Edward Noffsinger, a California psychologist who created the model in the 1990s at Kaiser Permanente, the state’s largest health maintenance organization (HMO).

Efficient? Economical? High-quality? We are not making widgets. We don’t need W. Edwards Deming approach to healthcare.  Teaching groups of patients is one thing but treating groups of patients is another. Sure, we can always make things better but we are doing it backwards.  We are ACCEPTING the dogma that third-parties need to be part of the system and are tailoring our new and great ideas around them.  That is problem.  They need to be removed and when that happens it opens up true competition, true capitalism and truly novel ideas that actually help people instead of treating them on an assembly line.