A doctor's office --- or even a regional medical center --- has different scaling pressures than a call center. Call centers are centralized. They're more strongly incentivized to:

* Ramp up new hires as cheaply as possible

* Keep staff maximally interchangeable and minimally accountable

* Keep their resources as close to oversubscribed as possible

A doctor's office has these same pressures, but on a much smaller scale. It is a big deal for your doctor to hire a new full-time nurse. Patients will interact with staff face-to-face and at length. As busy as the office gets during busy hours, there are prolonged lulls.

Call centers also win several extra problems that a doctor's office doesn't have:

* Terrible continuity across multiple calls

* The need to talk lay people through basic medical testing (ever tried to do tech support for someone who doesn't know how to use a mouse?)

* The personnel management problems of having multiple tiers of support staff.

I don't have any arguments about standardizing medicine. If you reread anything I've written today, I'm in favor of the nurse practitioner model, and I see the problem with relying on full-service medical doctors. I just think call centers are terrible for consumers.