How to Get the Maximum Health Benefits from Your Annual Checkup

AUSTIN, Texas - April 26, 2017 - PRLog -- How often do you get a checkup? Are you satisfied with the care you are getting? In an era of connected health devices like the Apple Watch or FitBit, detailed online health resources like Web M.D., or virtual online visits (telemedicine) does the annual physical even make sense anymore? We take a behind-the-scenes look at how healthcare laws and insurance reimbursements are changing the doctor-patient relationship and how you can get the most out of your annual physical exam.

In an era where major political fights are taking place in Washington over the future of healthcare, it's easy to overlook the role the doctor-patient relationship plays in ensuring your optimal health.

From the perspective of many patients, the annual doctor's visit can seem like an expensive interruption in our daily lives, one without a lot of apparent benefits. When you add up the inconveniences, including taking time off work, paying for parking, hassles with insurance and co-pays, long wait times in a sterile waiting room where you try to dodge germs from sneezing sick people – it's no wonder many of us are completely exasperated by the time the receptionist says "the doctor will see you now."

But will he or she? You're ushered into a small examination room, only to wait in your underwear for a further indeterminable amount of time for what appears to be a doctor's assistant arriving to ask you an impossibly long series of questions about your health history.

Then, finally, your doctor suddenly pops in –  for a minute or two — but by this time, the detailed health questions you wanted to ask have disappeared from your mind. By the time your recall them, the doctor has waved a curt goodbye and gone off to visit the next patient.

Sound familiar?

Let's replay this scenario from the point of view of the physician to get a better understanding of what's happening behind the scenes.

Frustrations from the Physician's Point of View
If you as a patient are frustrated with the healthcare system, you haven't heard the half of it.

As most physicians will attest, they didn't spend years at medical school to practice medicine in this hurried fashion. They would like nothing more than spending 30 minutes, if not longer, with each patient.

Yet, in the past twenty years, the economics of lower reimbursement payments from insurance companies and government programs like Medicare/Medicaid have driven many primary care doctors to respond by dramatically increasing the number of patients they see each day to make up for the reimbursement shortfall. As a result, it's not uncommon for some physicians to see upwards of 20 patients during office hours.

This rapid whirlwind of patient encounters is accomplished with the help of what are euphemistically called 'physician extenders.' These include Physician's Assistants (PAs), Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs), and Nurse Practitioners (NPs) — all of whom to a greater or lesser degree (depending on which US state you are in) can diagnose illnesses and prescribe medications under the authority of the physician in charge. 'Scribes' are another new category of physician extenders — they dutifully follow the caregiver, writing down all the patient's chart notes and entering them into the electronic medical records systems, insurance reports, etc.

But you say, "Don't doctors make a lot of money already? Why do they need to make more?" While that may be true for many specialists, such as dermatologists, radiologists, and anesthesiologists, the reimbursements for your friendly local general practice doctor or internist have gone down steadily over recent years — to the point that some solo practitioners are heading for the exit door.

In fact, as reimbursement rates have gone down, the frustration of solo practitioner doctors has gone up. Many who were close to retirement age hung up their stethoscopes for the last time and retired early. Other primary care doctors have banded together into larger physician groups, or have left their independent practices behind entirely to become employees in hospital systems, where, even though they still have to see more patients than they'd like, they don't have to shoulder the responsibility for acquiring and managing a large patient population. Fewer young doctors graduating from medical school envision their future as an independent physician operating their own individual practices; instead, they are joining healthcare groups as employees from the start.

Among the remaining solo practitioner physicians, quite a few are pursuing new business models that help raise their compensation income, such as converting their patient populations over to what is known as Cash Pay (no insurance is accepted, patient must pay the visit fees directly) or Concierge Care, where patients pay an annual 'subscription' fee (typically between one and two thousand dollars a year) in order to remain part of the doctor's practice.

The Ideal Patient, from the Physician's Point of View
So, given this situation, what can you as a patient do to help make the situation (in which everyone can be frustrated) work better so you can receive the best possible healthcare from your doctor?

Let's pose the question to the physician: "Can you describe an ideal patient? What do they do right?"


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