Quote:
Originally Posted by Mikeod
Booking fewer patients in advance per day results in extending the wait time for a routine appt to an unsatisfactory level. While this thread is about the wait once you get to an appt, there are other threads/posts that have concerns regarding the wait to get that appt. For example, at one point, the wait for a routine appt with me was approaching three months. Completely unacceptable. The best solution would be to add staff to better handle the patient volume. But that means additional space for them to work and additional support staff and room for them. Then there needs to be more OR time for the additional staff, and more beds for patients that require admission. And on and on. So, let's build another facility. But the response of insurance companies and government to increasing health care costs is to cut reimbursement to health care providers, so where does the money come from to make these changes.
Another's solution is to add extenders such as PAs or NPs. But we've seen how some patients object to not seeing the doctor.
Do I have an answer? Nope. I guess I just am troubled by the inference that because a patient is kept waiting that the doctor doesn't care. My personal experience is that most of the time a patient may be kept waiting because the doctor really does care, for the patient right there in front of them, which is their primary concern at the moment.
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I don't think the doctors don't care, Mikeod. I think the accountants don't care, and push the doctors into an unacceptable position. Then the patients/customers suffer.
Maybe the answer is to enter a teaching hospital's medical system. Our experience with the University of Michigan health care system, for example, was so far superior to our experience with local medical groups in our location outside of Grand Rapids, MI. We encountered so much overbooking and poor service and attitude in our local community that we switched our total health care over to U of M even though it was almost three hours away. The difference was amazing.
No overbooking, acceptable waits, better treatment of us "customers," (none of the "doctor-is-God and you're lucky he's seeing you" attitude from the staff) and excellent care. We asked two of the doctors at U of M what they perceived the difference to be, and their answer was that they had no idea what the billing and profit-making practices were, did not have to be involved with that in any way, and could simply concentrate on their patients.
I don't know what the answer is, and I certainly don't think that doctors don't care. But I do know that we have been able to find some good doctors down here who don't overbook.