Time's Up!

9The Direct Primary Care Disrupters

I became a concierge physician for the same reason I became a doctor—I want to help people. Patients deserve to be involved in their care and receive the valuable service of planning for optimal health with the guidance of a family physician who is dedicated to the care of the patient.

—Dr. Brian Nadolne, MD, Marietta, GA (quoted in The Doctor's Expanded Guide to Concierge Medicine)

If you have ever interacted with the health care system in the United States, you've experienced battered patient syndrome, a term I learned from Dr. W. Ryan Neuhofel, founder of NeuCare, a direct primary care physician in Lawrence, Kansas. Between the bureaucracy of the insurance system and the physician's back office to the electronic health records that force doctors to spend more time focused on their screens than on the patient, this system is broken. One doctor complained he was becoming a better typist than physician.

It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss why this is so. Suffice to say, the similarities between the medical profession and the professions we focus on here are vast. Doctors are concerned with maintaining our physical health while accountants protect our financial health. Yet just as there is no diagnosis code for caring in medicine, there is no billing code on the timesheet for investing in relationships with our customers in the professions. We are as much on a fee‐for‐service treadmill as are doctors, facing the same incentives ...