Pros: more time spent with patients, access to a physician basically 24/7, sometimes included are other amenities (labs, imaging, sometimes access to rx at doctors office for simple generics, gym discounts, eye doctor discounts, etc)
Cons: it’s an extra cost to get access to that physician yearly ranging from a few hundred US dollars per year to sometimes thousands $1.5k-3k (or tens of thousands or more), those who aren’t financially lucky to be that well off don’t get such access.
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That said, some of us do this on the side to augment our salary a bit as medicine has become too much of a business based on quantity and not quality. Sad that I hear from patients that said a simple small town family doc like myself can spent 20-30mins with a patient when other providers barely spend 3 mins. My regular patients get usually 20-30mins with me on a visit unless it’s a quick one for refills and I don’t leave until they are done and have no questions. My concierge patients get 1 hour minimum and longer if they like. I offer free in-depth medical record review where I get sometimes boxes of old records to review someone’s med history if they are a new concierge patient. Had a lady recently deal with neuropathy and paresthesias for years. Normal blood counts. Long story short. She had moderate iron deficiency and vitamin b 6 deficiency from history of taking isoniazid in a different country for TB and biopsy proven celiac disease. Neuropathy basically gone with iron and b6 supplements and a celiac diet after I recommended a GI eval for endoscopy. It takes time to dig into charts like this and CMS doesn’t pay the bills to keep the clinic lights open to see patients like that all the time and this is why we are in such a bad place healthcare wise in the USA were we have chosen quality than quantity and the powers that be are number crunchers and not actual health care providers. It serves us right for let’s admins take over and we are all paying the price.
So much more I want to say but I don’t think many will read this. But if you read this and don’t like your doctor, please look around. There are still some of us out there that care about quality medicine and do try our best to spend time with the patient. If you got one of those “3 minute doctors” look for one or consider establishing care with a resident clinic at an academic center were you can be seen by resident doctors and their attending physicians. It’s not the most efficient but can almost guarantee those resident physicians will spend a good chunk of time with you to help you as much as they can.
That's how it works here too, in PCP-Centric plans. The PCP gets paid, regardless if the patient shows up or not. But is also responsible to be the primary contact point for the patient with the health system, and referrals to specialists.
These are self inflicted problems, we should work on these and improve them, not give up and rely on llms for everything
LLMs might make doctors cheaper (and reduce their pay) by lowering demand for them. The law of supply and demand then implies that care will be cheaper. Do we not want cheaper care? Similarly, LLMs reduce the backlog, so patients who do need to see a doctor can be seen faster, and they don't need as many visits.
LLMs can also break the stranglehold of medical schools: It's easier to become an auto-didact using an LLM since an LLM can act like a personal tutor, by answering questions about the medical field directly.
LLMs might be one of the most important technologies in medicine.
Who's responsible when the llm fucks up ?
&c.
All of your points sound like the classic junior "I can code that in 2 days" naive take on a problem.
Obviously a GP refers to specialists when necessary, but he is qualified to triage issues and perform initial treatment in many cases.
But, presumably for liability and out of a genuine attempt to get me the best care possible, they _prefer_ to send me off to a specialist. Either way I'm not being treated until the specialist has time, which take a couple months at least.
And then 6⁺ months to be seen be a specialist.
For better worse, even before the advent of LLMs, people were simply Googling whatever their symptoms were and finding a WebMD or MayoClinic page. Well, if they were lucky. If they weren't lucky, they would find some idiotic blog post by someone who claimed that they cured their sleep apnea by drinking cabbage juice.
To an MD?