Content area
Full Text
It's late on a Friday afternoon and Dr. Bob Berstrom's wedged into bumper-to-bumper traffic en route to a patient's home.
A house call?
"You bet," said Berstrom, explaining that house calls are just one of the perks of being a patient of Bellevue-based MD2 practice, which was founded by Dr. Howard Maron and Dr. Scott Hall in 1996.
Of course, that kind of service costs, but if the waiting list to join MD2 and similar premium practices is any indication, there are plenty of Washington residents willing to cough up extra money to get services above and beyond what is offered through most of today's medical plans.
Dr. Garrison Bliss, a founding partner of Seattle Medical Associates with Dr. Mitchell Karton, agrees that premium practices - or retainer medicine - is the wave of the future.
The success has drawn other medical professionals to approach Bliss for advice to adjust their own practices. MD2's founders are contemplating franchising their business model, and Virginia Mason adopted retainer medicine as a patient option last year.
While each model is slightly different, they each address doctors' concerns that they can't make ends meet inside the managed care model.
"There's no question that the way we've set up our practice is working," said Bliss. "Is it a success for our patients? Absolutely. Is it successful for our physicians who now have more time for each patient and for our families when we're not on call? Absolutely. Is it successful financially for the practice? Yes."
What Drs. Karton, Bliss, Maron and Hall have in common is that they were all once partners in a traditional medical practice which was bought out by Swedish Hospital.
When Swedish in turn sold the practice to Pac Med only a year later, the doctors paired off and began addressing the issues they felt were rampant in the medical community as a whole.
"What patients are beginning to realize, I think," said Dr. Bliss, "is that most medical practices are barely getting by financially. I know that...