Can A Doctor Afford To Be A Healer? The Loss of Leadership

There is an hidden loss resulting from third party cost cutting measures that is over-shadowed by the more visible reductions in physician fees and medical delivery choices - but equally as detrimental to quality care. What’s lost is the leadership and partnering doctors have with their patients when they are forced into standardized treatment plans to meet third party payer schedules.

Standardized treatment plans put the payer in the physician’s role of care giver. They view patients as statistics rather than people, erode the doctor patient relationship, separate each from the other, creating a gap between the doctor, the patient as an individual person, and, in the end, the healing process itself. Standardization forces doctors out of sync with their training and knowledge, limits the quality and quantity of care they can provide, and stunts the patient’s journey toward wellness.

One recommendation that can help offset reductions on caring and income is to acknowledge the fact that restrictive healthcare policy is the newparadigm in medicine. Once done it will be easier to accept and embrace a new set of business principals aimed at keeping your practice healthy. These include practice enhancement marketing strategies that illustrate exceptional evidence-based scores for specific procedures. This type of marketing strategy is already being used successfully by the largest, most prestigious institutions. It makes them stand out from the competition and get a bigger share of the patient market. It can do the same for any practice of any size or specialty - and it may even put healing back into the doctor patient relationship.