According to the CDC, around 990.8 million patients make office visits each year. As you might imagine, this fills up doctors’ time and makes it more difficult to get a timely appointment.

Fortunately, the idea of concierge medicine continues to rise. If you’re not happy with the time it takes for you to make an appointment or the amount of time your doctor actually spends with you, then you may want to consider switching to this type of care plan.

What Is a Concierge?

This care system requires patients to pay a concierge doctor an upfront fee in order to receive a more specialized care. The cost can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars. However, you may find it worth the price, and you can find other places to cut medical costs.

You may also refer to this practice as:

• direct care
• retainer-fee medical practice
• membership medicine
• boutique medicine

Regardless of what you call the system, this benefits both doctors and patients alike.

Benefits of Concierge Medicine

Concierge medicine offers many benefits to the physician and to the patient, making it continue to gain popularity. Read on to learn all of the benefits of concierge practice.

Primary Physician Availability

Depending on your city of residence, your doctor’s popularity, and your ailment you can wait days, weeks, or even months to see your doctor. Even trying to get a simple question answered over the phone can feel like pulling teeth. Fortunately, membership medicine significantly opens up your doctor’s availability.

In order to make enough money, doctors often see over 2,000 patients each. Due to the retainer fee of direct care, a concierge doctor can lower this number to less than 500.

This means that you get in faster when you call for an appointment. Also, this frees the doctor’s time to communicate more frequently via email, phone calls, text messages, and even FaceTime. This increased availability also allows the doctor more time to communicate with colleagues about possible diagnoses, which helps both parties.

Patient-Doctor One on One Time

Have you ever gone in to see your doctor and felt so rushed that you forgot every concern and question you wanted to discuss with them? Because concierge opens up availability for the doctor, it takes away that rushed feeling that both parties experience in a regular office setting.

The doctor can better focus on the patient’s needs. The patient gets more time to feel fully heard and assessed.

Prevention Over Reaction

Patients often call the doctor due to illness, but a concierge doctor gets to focus more on prevention. They can focus more time on reading patient history and fully understanding who they are dealing with, rather than the disease they need to treat.

All-Inclusive Care

Patients, stop searching the internet for, “pain management doctors near me”. The concierge doctor knows your history and their availability allows them to take the time to find the right specialist for you if you need treatment beyond their capability.

Switch to Concierge Care Today!

Whether you’re a doctor or a patient, the benefits of concierge medicine make this switch appealing. It offers more time and less headache!

Weigh out the benefits of switching and consider getting on board with this helpful trend. Find more useful tips on our website!