Are your Employees Getting the Best Care Possible?
To keep your people healthy and on the job, you need to help them find and efficiently access the best care. But with more than 800,000 physicians in the U.S., that task is daunting. And once you discover which physicians fall into that elite group, how can your employees get an appointment with one of these highly skilled medical practitioners quickly?
The Old Fashioned Approach
Most people rely on the same method of finding a doctor that their parents and grandparents used—recommendations from friends and family. While this approach can yield a good doctor-patient fit, it does not provide you with any of the hard data that would be used to determine if a physician is qualified to be counted as one of the United States’ best doctors. Most people recommend a doctor with whom they feel comfortable and have had positive experiences. They do not take into consideration mortality rates, how many patients a physician has cared for with certain conditions like heart disease, diabetes, infertility, or depression, how many years the doctor has been in practice, or how frequently and successfully she has performed specific surgeries and procedures.
While using the recommendations of friends and family can work if you’re healthy and choosing your family doctor, this method has serious flaws when you’re faced with an illness like cancer or are in need of coronary artery bypass surgery. And even the choice of a family physician should warrant more research since your internist or your child’s pediatrician is essentially the person responsible for helping to keep you healthy and spot diseases in their earliest stages so you can benefit from early intervention and treatment.
An Insurance-Driven Decision?
Many people must choose their physicians from a selection of practitioners who belong to their health insurance plan. But, especially when confronted with a life-threatening diagnosis, they find their options limited and choose to look outside their plan for the doctors who’ve had success treating the disease they are battling.
While hospitals now routinely offer services to help patients find a doctor, there are no quality screening mechanisms in place with most of Find-A-Doctor lines and web listings. Regional magazine features on an area’s top physicians focus on doctors who were voted for by their current patients, essentially the equivalent of a friend’s recommendation. In fact, a study published in the American Journal of Public Health by University of Iowa researcher Dr. Arthur Hartz found that “Best Doctor” surveys are rarely based on objective information such as outcome data, but rather on the physicians’ position and ability as a researcher, lecturer, or administrator.
A Wealth of Names but no Guidance
Other resources that can be used to find a doctor include printed and online guides that consider the recommendations of fellow physicians, education, residency, board certification, experience, disciplinary actions, admitting privileges, and more. While all of these resources provide information that a savvy health care consumer can use to choose a physician, it remains difficult for even the most educated consumer to wade through the sea of information and make an informed choice.
A New Breed of Resources
That’s why a new breed of resources for finding the best doctors is developing. Private health advisory firms like PinnacleCare do far more than offer members a list of doctors. PinnacleCare’s health care advisors gather a complete health record for each person in a member’s family, research and compile a report about which physicians and hospitals offer the best quality care for the disease or health issue, and even help members get expedited access to these doctors, many of whom are members of the firm’s Medical Advisory Board or on staff at the Centers of Excellence affiliated with PinnacleCare.
“Medical care in the U.S. can provide great quality, but with more than 800,000 doctors in the country, it’s difficult to know who provides the best care in any given field. In addition, most people have multiple problems, like heart disease and diabetes for example, that are being managed by different physicians, so no one person is treating the whole patient,” explains John Hutchins, Co-founder of PinnacleCare. “By creating a firm that provides independent, high quality health management delivered by professional health advisors, we are able to help people who are lost in the system and confused by the multiplicity of options and complex information available,” he believes.
