We Can’t Improve the Healthcare System Without Involving Clinicians:
Our modern healthcare system values procedures, tests, referrals, and prescriptions. Relative to these things, disease prevention and counseling about lifestyle modifications generate very little revenue. In most medical offices, clinicians are measured and rewarded based on their ability to generate revenue – not on their ability to improve quality of life or health outcomes. It’s not surprising that when clinicians’ value to the organization relies upon revenue generation, these services are not valued or prioritized.
Over the past decade, more and more employers have come to understand that this model doesn’t benefit the primary players in the healthcare space.
It does nothing to improve the quality of life for the patients
It creates dissatisfaction among the healthcare team
It hurts the bottom line of the entire organization
The only ones that win in the current healthcare model are the big businesses that have managed to insert themselves between the patients and the clinicians.
Savvy employers, who pay the majority of healthcare costs, are leaning more and more into a different model – one that values preventive health and counseling above all else. To offset the exorbitant costs of healthcare, they are contracting with on-site/near-site clinics or direct primary care clinics – where healthcare providers are not measured by the revenue they generate but by their ability to generate quality outcomes.
Clinicians, who went into the field of medicine because they wanted to help patients improve their quality of life, are clamoring to work within these clinics – to have the opportunity to practice medicine with the patient’s best intentions at the core of their practice.
Individuals benefit in multiple ways – from being able to access healthcare at work to avoiding costly copays to having access to clinicians who can take the time to focus on counseling and disease prevention.
What’s missing?
Excess weight and/or a poor diet are responsible for over 80% of chronic diseases. Although clinicians want to help their patients suffering from these diseases, most simply don’t know how. Obesity medicine still isn’t being taught in medical schools and clinical training programs. Most physicians and nurse practitioners receive little to no training in nutrition. How can we expect them to effectively prevent and treat chronic disease when they haven’t been trained in the fields of science needed to treat them: Obesity Medicine and nutrition?
As part of a comprehensive strategy, Health Partners MD will provide dedicated healthcare team members with the foundation of Obesity Medicine and give them a proven, cost-effective framework by which to improve cardiometabolic health and treat excess weight. The Health Partners MD team will support team members throughout the course of the contract, providing peer-to-peer consultations and monthly town hall Zoom calls – a place to receive pertinent clinical updates and get questions answered.
We put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into our medical training. We did it because we wanted to make the world a better place. We wanted to help people – empower them – heal them. We didn’t walk this difficult path just to become cogs in a machine – spending our days maximizing revenue for corporate profits.
The typical clinical today sees twenty-six patients each day. Most of the time is spent writing prescriptions to manage chronic diseases – conditions that are steadily worsening. We aren’t allowed the time to connect with patients – to explore the lifestyle factors that contribute to their disease – let alone counsel them about how to reverse disease.
Improving patients’ cardiometabolic health and watching them thrive is refreshing – and immensely gratifying. Making the switch to healing patients – instead of just managing their chronic diseases reminds us why we went into medicien in the first place.
Health improvement requires more than just medication.
There is another way: