This isn't feasible for a huge swathe of the USA, often because of costs/insurance but sometimes literally just accessibility/availability. A few years ago it took me nearly 8 months to find a PCP in my city that was accepting new patients (and, wee, they dropped my insurance less than a year after).
Is there a proven and guaranteed way to do this? Because otherwise it sounds very idealistic, almost like "if everything were somehow better, then things would be less bad". Doctor time will always be scarce. It sounds like it delays helping people in the here and now in order to solve some very complicated system-wide problem.
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.
I think the "we" that can work on these systemic problems and actually improve them are a very different "we" than those of us who just need basic health care right now and will take anything "we" can get.
Maybe time to ask AI why you’re looking for a technical solution rather than addressing the gaslighting that has left you with such piss-poor medical care in the richest country on earth?
if its not solved in the richest country maybe its not so easy to solve unless you want to hand wave the diffuclt parts and just describe it as "rich people being greedy"
It's such a dysfunctional situation that the "rich people being greedy" is the most likely explanation. Either that or the U.S. citizenry are uniquely stupid amongst rich countries.
It’s a physician who gets paid a subscription by a small panel of patients.
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.
> It’s a physician who gets paid a subscription by a small panel of patients
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.
If the GP can handle my problem, I probably didn't need to go to the doctor anyway. A lot of care is done by specialists, and it can _easily_ take weeks or months to get an appointment with one. This is strongly dependent on one's insurance network though.
Ok, to be fair, they _can_ probably handle my problems better than I can.
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.
Yes, in my area if you need to find a new doctor you literally can't. This is a major city. The online booking for any major hospital network literally shows no results because the next appointment would be 90+ days out. If you have an existing relationship maybe you can get in in two weeks.
While you are technically correct, we live in the real world. People are busy and/or broke. Many cannot afford to go to the doctor every time they get the sniffles or have a question. Doing some preliminary research is fine and, I’d argue, responsible.
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?