Total Access Medical - Direct Primary Care Blog

Why Every Person Should Have a Concierge Doctor

Posted by Cynthia Kuper, Ph.D. on Sep 02, 2017

Concierge doctors mean not only personalized wholistic medical care, concierge doctors mean preventative care. This is why you should care:

Preventative healthcare guards against cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory illness and many other causes of disease that lead to increased admittance to the hospital and increased costs to the patient.

In 2010 patients receiving concierge doctor care had 56%fewer non-elective admissions, a 63% decrease in certain other admissions compared to patients not treated with preventative concierge care. of concierge patients were 97% less frequent for heart attack and 91% less frequent for pneumonia, two of the highest reasons for hospitalizations. The list of benefits goes on, as stated in a 2012 study by the American Journal of Managed Care .

 

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All of this telling a story of a patient in a traditional doctor setting seeing increased admissions to emergency rooms and hospitals that were completely avoidable. The increased cost to them in the thousands of dollars. How does this happen?

Imagine this real life scenario. You wake up 12 am on a Saturday, it hurts when you swallow, your glands are painful, you feel your muscle and joints hurting and as you sit up you realize you are spiking a fever. My guess is you are not imagining right now, you are remembering the last time this actually happened to you or your child or your spouse. What remedy did you have? Wait a good 48 hours to see a Dr? That is unacceptable. Go to the ER? That costs on average of $1000.00 to start and puts you at further risk of contracting infectious desease like MRSA and bringing that back into your home.

What if that early morning episode of sickness and extrememe discomfort and anxiety was quickly and easily alleviated with a few text messages giving you doctors orders on how to practice safe self care followed by a house call by dawn?

I will share with you a very personal story that happened last year to my son, then 7 years old. He woke up on a saturday morning with a lump the size of a golf ball in his cheek and low grade fever. I had no concierge care, no remedy other than the ER. He was seen in the ER by two nurses and finally a pediatric ER physician on call. She opened his mouth, probed abruptly with a wooden tongue depressor, banged it against his tooth, pressed her hands under his jaw and on his cheek and told us he had a dental absess. She prescibed an antibiotic and told us to go our dentist for treatment. By that the end of that week, he had developed a skin infection caused by a bacterium reisistant to the antibiotic prescribed in the ER and had skin sores. We traced the infectious desease back to his two hour stint in the local ER, a high end suburb where people tend to feel a false sense of security. This began a six month long nightmare of chemical baths and house disinfecting leaving us exhausted and stresed, further lowering our immunity to the next round of seasonal illness.

Preventing these scaenarios is just the begining of what concierge medicine offers you and your family. This is the first of many reasons why these statistics are so favorable on health outcomes of patients seen by concierge doctors. Add on functional medicine, holistic care, interventional medicine and you have enacted a very powerful lifestyle change, if not life saving change.

For patients in a concierge practice, according to reports, all admissions and emergency rooms visits are substantially reduced saving the patients, you, hundreds of dollars after cost of concierge care.

On average each and every emergency room visit costs the patient $1000.00-$1800.00 depending on where in the country they are located. For most patients we can completely rid them of unnecessary emergency room visits and save them thousands of dollars simply by having them enroll in concierge doctor care.

Enroll you and your family with a concierge doctor today before another thousand dollars goes out of your pocket and you wish you knew how to prevent it. Do not wish. Enroll. If Total Access Medical does not provide concierge service in your area, find out who does.