Imagine Doctors and Patients Talking
By KRISTEN GERENCHER
WSJ
Your visits to the doctor are likely to take on a different tone as efforts to stem rapidly rising health-care costs move forward, transforming what often feels like a trip to the principal's office into something more like an intimate dinner conversation.
Much of that conversation will be about not just what treatments and drugs you need, but how much they cost, what they might do for you and whether, in the end, your health will benefit.
It will involve getting back to basics where patients and primary-care doctors establish trusting relationships that last beyond one or two visits, says Ted Epperly, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians and a family doctor in Boise, Idaho.
"By having the relationship I can help you avoid having these things you don't need," he says. "More care in our health-care system is not necessarily better care."
That doesn't mean patients won't receive life-saving treatments or cutting-edge technologies to improve their health when such things are warranted. Instead, the focus will be on weeding out wasteful spending in more routine cases where less is at stake.
(Continued here.)
WSJ
Your visits to the doctor are likely to take on a different tone as efforts to stem rapidly rising health-care costs move forward, transforming what often feels like a trip to the principal's office into something more like an intimate dinner conversation.
Much of that conversation will be about not just what treatments and drugs you need, but how much they cost, what they might do for you and whether, in the end, your health will benefit.
It will involve getting back to basics where patients and primary-care doctors establish trusting relationships that last beyond one or two visits, says Ted Epperly, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians and a family doctor in Boise, Idaho.
"By having the relationship I can help you avoid having these things you don't need," he says. "More care in our health-care system is not necessarily better care."
That doesn't mean patients won't receive life-saving treatments or cutting-edge technologies to improve their health when such things are warranted. Instead, the focus will be on weeding out wasteful spending in more routine cases where less is at stake.
(Continued here.)
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