Concierge Care Background
The concierge medical service has many benefits over the traditional model of healthcare that most people are accustomed to. The concierge service in healthcare can be considered a luxury service in which doctors are paid a fee beyond that of their standard insurance premium. Furthermore, preventative care most likely has the most potential to improve the lives of U.S. citizens, however, despite the benefits associated with preventative care, it is difficult to implement preventative care because this type of program could be difficult to profit from, and can even decrease profits from future treatments. Yet, there are some innovative models that can be used to bridge the gaps in the current health care environment.
Dr. Green and Dr. Jones could utilize the concierge model to service the portion of their clientele that could afford to pay the premiums. Currently, the patient census consists of about forty percent of Medicare patients that would likely not be interested in a program and thus the practice should differentiate their services to offer different levels of services to patients. It is recommended that the doctors develop the concierge model in their local community; especially if they can get a guarantee from the CEO of the large company that has recently expressed interest. The fifty executives that would join the concierge program in this contract would represent one hundred-fifty thousand dollars annually and could cover a bulk of the related expenses associated with further developing this service.
Concierge Services and their Value Proposition
However, in order to truly understand the value of concierge healthcare services in the U.S. healthcare system, it is necessary to contrast these services with the services included in the more traditional and standardized healthcare delivery system that accounts for the vast majority of the services available in the U.S. Therefore, in such an environment, despite spending close to three trillion dollars a year on healthcare as a country, significantly more than any other country in total or per capita, the U.S. is still not competitive with healthcare systems found in other of the industrialized countries in terms quality and price (Lavizzo-Mourey, 2015).
For example, one current trend that has emerged in the effort to combat rising costs, is for both public and private insurance companies to compensate medical organizations in a way in which there is a cap on the prices they can charge for certain services. The maximum allocated costs for services is known as the reference price. Although reference pricing has enormous potential to curb rising healthcare costs, there are also many limitations to this strategy as well as a limited range of services that it is appropriate for -- such as non-urgent standardized services (Lechner, Gourevitch, &…
