Texas Doctors Experiment With Care, Payment Models
PLANO — At Village Health Partners, a comprehensive medical practice in this Dallas suburb, patients receive a year’s worth of wellness exams in a single visit, get their e-mails answered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and have their mammogram or MRI results logged into their electronic medical record by the time they pull out of the parking lot.
Kelsey-Seybold in Houston is like the Galleria of health clinics: It has storefronts for every imaginable specialty, online, same-day, no-referral-necessary appointment scheduling, an on-site pharmacy, even complimentary valet parking.
As the United States grapples with spiraling health care costs ...
Comments (7)
Donald Green
Efficiency of care is a wonderful thing but its ability to lower costs depends on shaking personnel out of the system. It is the worker bees that drive the cost. Doing the math for this operation namely 45,000 patients served by 14 primary care physicians produces a ration of 3200+ patients per physician. Given the wisdom that a full practice is represented by 2500 patients per provider, this is an overload. If the difference is made up by using nurse practitioners that is fine but the proposition still holds. Since NP garner less salary they become a low cost method of delivering care. This is all right but the public should know what they are getting. So as usual the gained income depends on how many people you can see given the fixed costs of your setup.
Real health cost savings will only come about when the bureaucracy that supports delivery is reduced. With a myriad of insurers all with different pricing for the same service operating and what you get depending on your clout and negotiating skills no great savings can be expected by these models.
I applaud the efficiency of care and the direction to prevent care but this does not save money. If you are fortunate to live longer then you enter a stage of life that is the costliest to the health care system. We just can't prevent our way out of the escalation of the price tag of health care and its impact on national economics. We must reform our insurance system. No other alternative will give more bang to the buck. Just to note that over the last 30 years the pool of MDs/providers has increased 300% while the administrative census has increased 2000%. Now I ask where would the real savings come from?
BiffTannen
Ah yes, not accepting Medicaid. Let them eat cake, and die at the door. We won't have those sort of people in our establishment. Is there any facet of Plano that isn't reprehensible?
Healthy Texan
Interesting that most people that go to Legacy are not poor enough to get Medicaid. This means they are already going to be healthier people. Doctors don't like Medicaid or Medicare patients so now they threaten to stop seeing them. Access to care is key and when a doc is not available, instead of free nurse practitioners to create new access points, the docs argue to let the patients get sick enough and go to an emergency room where costs skyrocket.
Philip Goetz via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Doctors have ipads now.
sssdddd
Texas syle health care for all....
Give every person, man woman and child a 6 shooter. That way if they get sick they can shoot themselve.
Bill Eaves via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Kill obamacare
Sergio Hernandez De Santos via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Could I pay'em with a chicken?