Simple Access with Direct Primary Care
What happens if we take things back to the way they used to be? If there are no more insurance claims? And you can get an appointment the next day?
The Institute for Healthcare Consumerism (IHC) met last week in Las Vegas, where it featured a panel on healthcare delivery innovations coming from physicians and surgeons. One of the panelists, Samir Qamar, MD, Founder and CEO of MedLion, reported that we are witnessing a national movement for direct primary care (DPC), which seeks to reduce the primary care episode to two parties only: doctor and patient. By eliminating copays and limits to visits, Dr. Qamar says that doctors can spend much more time with their patients. As an example of the liberation of doctors, he says that DPC physicians have no problem doing telemedicine visits also, freed from having to worry about billing. The DPC model also eliminates the complexity of modern CPT and ICD10 bureaucracy, and let's doctors speak plain English: a cold is a "cold" and a headache and a "headache."
The DPC delivery model shares some of the features of the Surgeo surgery delivery model, which seeks to simplify access to such covered procedures as knee replacement and often non-covered benefits as penile implant surgery. For example, Surgeo's model allows any customer, including employers, to access comprehensive surgery packages without an insurance premium. So it caught our attention and we wanted to understand more how the market is shaping up and developing new solutions that can broaden and improve access to healthcare.
We caught up with Dr. Qamar at the 2015 IHC Forum West. Click on the video below to watch the interview.
