Across the country, there are countless patients in their 70s or 80s who have multiple chronic conditions like COPD, congestive heart failure, and others. Many of them live on the edge and are retired, so they can’t afford more expensive healthcare.
Moreover, they’ve grown to dislike and distrust the medical system because of the decades of neglect they’ve went through.
In order to help these patients, primary care providers will need to adopt a more comprehensive approach. Instead of imply writing prescriptions and offering instructions, we should focus on the patients’ psychological, personal, and socioeconomic needs.
Every patient is uniquely challenged by a set of constraints and only by understanding those constraints can we help them!
Here Is What a Total Health Care Approach Looks Like:
- Primary care providers know that a patient’s health improves a lot more outside the clinic than inside it. The physician needs to motivate the patient to stick to the treatment and adopt better health choices before and after dropping by for a visit.
- Physicians will take the necessary time to make sure that the patient both understands and follows the care plan. You will need to involve yourself in your patient health choices and provide healthier alternatives. Go beyond superficial instructions and you’ll achieve more compliance from your patient. They will be healthier and will require less medical assistance in the future thanks to your continued interest in their health situation
- Physicians are both aware and eager to address their patients’ social determinants of health. You will have to adapt your instructions to match the patient’s socioeconomic situation. If they are technologically challenged, you should not schedule a virtual visit, for instance. On-site pharmacy is another aspect that will ease the patient’s situation.
- A physician will become more involved in the patient’s healthcare both inside and outside the clinic. Providing your personal contact details is one way of creating a valued relationship between yourself and your patient. The patient may call you outside business hours to inquire about their health, and that is perfectly fine.
Implement Transformative Primary Care
For seniors or anybody else, it might be challenging to identify practices in the United States that provide total health care. This is due to the fact that the fee-for-service model that governs American medicine makes it impossible to provide total health care. Total health care involves providing services without associated billing codes, which is strictly forbidden under fee-for-service medicine.
Fortunately, physicians are not concerned about billing codes in Primary Medical Care Center’s innovative primary care strategy. Based on the state of each patient, Medicare pays us annually on a full-risk capitation basis.
Our financial incentives encourage us to maintain each patient’s health for as long as we can, which is completely consistent with the all-encompassing approach to healthcare described in this piece.
A holistic approach to health care for our patients results in more than simply improved health. They receive a sense of belonging that they may have never had in the healthcare system because it shows them that they matter.
When our physicians participate in complete health care, they are able to practice medicine the way they have always wanted to but were unable to do so under the fee-for-service paradigm.
Many doctors who are dedicated about helping underprivileged seniors consider it more of a calling than a job. Primary Medical Care Center doctors may genuinely live up to that calling by assisting elderly patients through a comprehensive healthcare strategy.
You can call Primary Medical Care Center at (305) 751-1500 to learn more about our services and how we implement total healthcare to seniors and not only!