We’ve all tried to schedule appointments with a doctor only to find out the next available appointment is weeks or months later. We’ve all been put on hold for a simple question or forced to call someone else so they can deal with the problem instead; in the end, we usually just hang up in frustration. We’ve all been in that waiting area, sitting for hours until the nurse calls us back. Then we sit in the patient room for another half hour until the doctor comes in and spends a total of 5 minutes in the room. The doctor doesn’t bother to address more than one problem you bring to his attention and says you have to book another appointment. Then the cycle continues, not to mention that bill in the mail from insurance you get 6 months later!

As written in Forbes, “Live expectancy continues to decline. Heart disease and cancers are still the number one and number two causes of death respectively. Deaths of despair, like addiction and suicides, are also up. What gives? 

The missing element here is a holistic approach. Retail health arose to improve upon the standard delivery model, but it can’t wholly replace it. Its development is a step away from a focus on integrated primary care. This contributes to the further fragmentation of the delivery system rather than unifying it. It contributes to a patchwork of unattached and unrelated care in a way that continues to foster worse outcomes as the national statistics woefully illustrate. 

The road signs to better health are in plain sight, but what’s needed is a focus on continuity of care that is tailored to meet a patient's full health needs. This is hard to accomplish across a range of disconnected though largely competent providers.” The answer is a unified approach, through Direct Primary Care (our model). At Simplified Health, we are not trying to reinvent family medicine, we are trying to remember it. By eliminating insurance companies, we can better focus on YOU. Instead of the doctor spending his time doing paperwork and checking boxes for insurance companies, he can now spend that time with you! We are trying to be a part of the solution in healthcare by restoring family medicine to what it used to be.