As we frequently emphasize here, building a professional relationship with a primary care physician helps them to detect and prevent chronic conditions as early as possible… indeed, this proactive strategy lies at the heart of our MedBen WellLiving program. But there’s another advantage in steering plan members to primary care – it frees up specialists to focus on complex cases.
As internist Fred Pelman writes in MedPage Today:
“Personally, I think it’s a waste when I see patients seeing a cardiologist for their high cholesterol or their hypertension, an endocrinologist for their diabetes or their hypothyroidism, or a gastroenterologist for their reflux or fatty liver disease. There are so many examples of conditions for which patients have found their way to the ‘best of the best’, the famous specialist, the person who their friend told them they absolutely had to see. And the patients never want to let go of these amazing doctors. However, it’s often a waste of a specialist’s time for them to be refilling someone’s statin, or their thyroid replacement, or their insulin, or their blood pressure medicines.
“Maybe these specialists never want to let these patients go. Sure, those are easy visits, and the specialists probably welcome seeing a couple of really simple and stable patients appear on their schedules. But if we could return these folks to primary care, where we can manage the vast majority of things (with a commensurate level of support to take really great care of these patients), then we’d free up these specialists to handle the really tough cases, the ones where we call for help.”
Of course, there’s an added benefit: On average, a primary care visit is at least half the cost of a similar appointment with a specialist. And maintaining that primary care relationship reduces the chances that the patient will be in real need of a specialist’s care down the road.